[This session happened December 14th and was the final session of this run. My notes are a bit sketchy and it took longer than anticipated to sit down and write this, so it may be a bit thin on detail compared to other write-ups.]
PCs
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth, preaching the anti-corporate word
Seul-ki – androgynous human from Korea, a laconic expert with swords
Ash – male human car shaman/rigger, speaks in the third person and follows The Spirit of The Road
Roadrunner – female elf, a twitchy rigger with a need for speed who self-identifies as an orc
Limbsaw – female human street samurai with a monofilament chainsaw, works body disposal on the side
NPC’d
Alfonz – male elf decker, works as a lawyer as his day job
Krombopulos Michael – male orc physical adept, is a major fanboy of “The Elf in a Gecko Suit”
NPCs
Bee – Hired by The Fin to stand in for a gate guard
Lord Bowler – part of the driving crew hired by The Fin
Wednesday, March 4, 2076, 5:30 PM – Ash Wednesday
Having learned that the guard shift changed at 10:00 PM, meaning new guards would be showing up for duty before the run was complete, the team discussed options. The team decided the easiest would be to have Alfonz hack the security company’s system and re-assign the scheduled guards to other posts at a slightly later time. Alfonz hacked the system and sent them all to posts in Everett at 11:00 PM. This would buy us some safety time in case it was needed. [Spoilers: It was.]
The crew of impromptu car thieves rode up to the location of the target car collection in Bellevue, riding in an old model minivan with Lord Bowler at the wheel. Lord Bowler stopped the minivan a block short of the target and let Krombopulos Michael out.
Krom went ahead on foot, keeping out of the sight of the gate guard at the target home. Krom then jumped the fence and sidled up to the back of the guard shack. He silently bypassed the card-reader lock on the door to the guard shack and rolled a NeuroStun X grenade into the guard shack, closing the door behind the grenade. Seconds later the guard fell to the floor. Krom contacted the team via micro-transceiver, signaling it was safe to approach.
Lord Bowler drove the minivan up to the front gate and let the rest of the team out. By this point the NeuroStun X had dissipated inside the guard shack and Krom had the door open again. Bee, wearing a close facsimile of the guard uniform took the unconscious guard’s equipment belt and badge and put them on. She then stepped into the guard shack to stand watch while the heist was in action. Lord Bowler left to wait at the first drop-off point. There were five drop-off points set up in discrete locations various distances from the target, each with a car carrier ready to receive merchandise. Lord Bowler’s job was to shuttle drivers back to the target after they deposited a car at the various carriers.
Meanwhile, Baelthor took two more grenades of NeuroStun X to the walking guard patrol, guided by Alfonz, who had control of the house security cameras. Baelthor popped the “spoons” of the grenades and walked directly up to the guards, ignoring their orders to halt. By the time the guards realized what Baelthor was up to, the gas was knocking them out. [Edge was spent here to get this to go smoothly.] Baelthor’s freakish immunity to the stuff protected him from the effects of the gas. Once the gas dispersed, he called over the stronger members of the team to help drag the unconscious guards into the garage.
Inside the garage were a personnel elevator and a cargo elevator large enough to move three full-sized cars at a time. Off to one side is an equipment area and the unconscious guards are all stashed there, bound by zip-ties and duct tape. Limbsaw would spend most of the heist there watching the guards, he two monofilament chainsaws prominently displayed to keep them from getting ideas. Seul-ki stayed with her in case something unexpected happened and fools needed to be cut down.
Two levels down was the storage lot for the 50+ vehicles to be stolen. There was a round of appreciative whistles for the collection when the team stepped out of the elevator. Ash and Roadrunner started moving out the cars – first two sets of modern cars able to use GridGuide to drive themselves to the first car carrier, then a classic car each to directly drive. An hour later, they had performed this trick twice, filling up the first carrier with twelve cars. This maintained the pace necessary to get all of the cars out by 10:00 PM, when traffic would die down and the exotic cars would stand out more.
Deciding to chance a large wave of cars to speed things up, over the next hour, Ash and Roadrunner sent out every remaining rigged vehicle with the exception of the damaged moving trucks and the two Nissan Hound helicopters. Those would all go out in the final round as the chance of those being noticed by Knight Errant (or the neighbors) was highest. This cleared 15 cars in just under an hour, leaving just over half the collection still in the garage.
As the next wave was being brought up, an angry man in pajamas and a robe walked up and started arguing with Bee about the cars leaving illegally. Bee couldn’t talk the guy down and asked for help. Looking through the security cameras, Alfonz recognized the man as one of the Assistant District Attorneys for Seattle. Alfonz contact the man via commlink and the two talked. The ADA was angry as one of the cars he tried to buy off of “Sam” [the deceased owner] had just driven out of the neighborhood and he knew the cars were supposed to still be in escrow. After further negotiations, it turned out his anger could be quenched for 10,000¥. Alfonz contacted The Fin to get approval for the expense and she gave it. Alfonz transferred funds to an account the ADA supplied and the matter was resolved.
Due to the lack of rigged cars, the team was only able to get 3 cars out this round. Ash did the numbers and realized that, at their current rate, they would miss the 10:00 PM deadline to get all the cars. Gambling on security in order to make the run, Seul-ki was left guarding the guards alone and Baelthor and Krom was brought off of the response team to increase the number of drivers to five. This increased the number of cars in motion enough that the last pass would just empty the garage just before the security company realized something was up, even allowing the helicopters 30 minutes to warm up.
To hide the helicopters while they prepped, the damaged moving trucks were brought up and positioned in a perimeter to obscure the driveway. Then the helicopters were brought up and their rotor blades unfolded. Ash and Baelthor each cast and maintained Silence and sat in one helicopter each as the helicopters were warmed up by Roadrunner. This hid the whine of the engines and the thwop-thwop-thwop sound of the rotor blades. The last sports cars were brought up and readied for a quick escape while the team waited on the helicopters.
Once the helicopters were ready to fly, the trucks were sent away using GridGuide. Roadrunner remotely piloted the first helicopter away with Baelthor in it, maintaining his Silent spell. Once it was far enough away it would not be noticeable, she set it to auto-pilot and jumped back to her body. Ash had to leave the second helicopter to drive the last sports car away, so the sound of the helicopter spinning at full thrust suddenly broke across the neighborhood, setting off car- and house-alarms as the noise rattled windows. Roadrunner piloted the helicopter away as quickly as she could, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the first 9-1-1 calls. Ash took a moment to spray paint “Fuck the Po-Po” in black on the driveway before speeding away in the last sports car, heading out through the rear entrance of the of the neighborhood, just as the distant sounds of sirens could be heard approaching the front entrance.
Thursday, March 5, 2076
With the stolen vehicles stored away in safe garages until they were sold off or in the process of being sold, the team was paid by The Fin, along with a 1000¥ bonus for doing the job with style and no blood-shed.
End of Session
[So the session ran a bit long as we were trying to complete the run in a single game session. If we’d been willing to split it to a second session, the GM could have thrown in some complicating incidents like car chases while we were stealing the cars. Having a go-ganger pull up to one of the drivers in a hot rod and rev the engine for a race would have suckered in Roadrunner. Another way to go would have had a street gang try to carjack one of the classic sports cars and the driver trying to get away.]
[This entire run was driven (pardon the pun) by The Fin wanting more cash than the regular runs were providing, plus her desire to own some of the cars from Sam’s collection. She had to put together a small stake to pay the runners from, which is why it took nearly two months before she put the run into motion. She also had to lean on her contacts to get a pool of lower end shadowrunners to pull from and access to car carriers to move the stolen vehicles en mass. The pay-off for the run was an unqualified success as The Fin personally pulled in a six-figured profit after the run was over. I’m hoping this will inspire the other players to start working on side-runs for their own characters.]
[Plus, it was fun playing a different type of character for a change, which everyone seemed to enjoy. We made characters that were very different from our primary characters to try out different things.]
Session 1
[This session happened November 24th and is the first actual session of this run. About a third was The Fin and the GM off to the side setting things in motion and the rest was character interviews.]
PCs
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth, preaching the anti-corporate word
Seul-ki – androgynous human from Korea, a laconic expert with swords
Ash – male human car shaman/rigger, speaks in the third person and follows The Spirit of The Road
Roadrunner – female elf, a twitchy rigger with a need for speed who self-identifies as an orc
Krombopulos Michael – male orc physical adept, is a major fanboy of “The Elf in a Gecko Suit”, AKA, Void
Limbsaw – female human street samurai with a monofilament chainsaw, works body disposal on the side
NPC’d
Alfonz – male elf decker, works as a lawyer as his day job
Sunday, March 1, 2076
The Fin, still wanting personal possession of several cars in the estate of “Sam”, the Mr. Johnson (and ultimate target) of A Dwarf in Need. She had a plan to steal all of the vehicles and sell off the ones she didn’t want to recoup her costs and show a hefty profit. She finally felt she had enough spare nuyen to finance the run on her own, so she started asking around for the expertise she needed. She went to her Vory contact, Svetlana, asking for a bent lawyer. Svetlana put her into contact with Alfonz.
The Fin hired Alfonz to look into the estate of Robert Khordaldrum (AKA, Sam) to determine its status and the current location of the vehicle collection attached to the estate. Alfonz reported back that the estate had another week to two weeks before everything goes to auction as Robert Khordaldrum had no will nor heirs to place claims on any of his property. On paper, the vehicles show as still in the underground garage on his home property.
Realizing her time was short to grab the vehicles, she went to her mechanic contacts, Wheels (hired based on a recommendation from Prometheus) and Kaylee (met through Sin). The Fin explained she had a job and needed help putting it together. The Fin offered a finder’s fee for help locating:
- High end car carriers
- Chop shops able to handle plates and VINs
- Smuggler contacts to move high end vehicles overseas
- A container vessel captained by a person with negotiable morals
- A team of shadowrunners: 2 muscle, 1 B&E specialist, a mage or shaman, and some riggers, all of whom have first-rate driving skills
While Wheels and Kaylee started looking for what The Fin requested, The Fin contacted Bookie and asked him to place some discrete ads on the Dark Net, advertising a single run of black market, high-end vehicles for immediate sale, serious buyers only. She also had Bookie set up a separate contact point and bounce it to her commlink so buyers would not have her actual commlink number.
Wheels reported back that he had the car carriers lined up and word was out that Mr. Johnson was hiring shadowrunners. Kaylee reported she had secure loading locations for the car carriers to be loaded and locations for short-term discrete storage of vehicles, near the docks (necessary as the job would take place over three to four days).
Fin rented a back room at Ebey’s Bar in Exile in Everett and started holding interviews, posing as Mr. Johnson’s fixer. Out of a total of 36 interviews, The Fin hired eight runners: Ash, Krombopulos “Krom” Michael, Limbsaw, Alfonz (as a decker), Baelthor, Seul-ki, Lord Bowler (NPC rigger contact of Ash’s), and Roadrunner (PC rigger contact of Ash’s). All of the runners had quality driving skills and/or other skills necessary for the job. The Fin set a date for the runners to meet and get the low down on the job.
End of Session
[Krombopulos Michael’s fanboy crush on Void wasn’t planned, but it made sense once his character was finished and explained to the group. Void’s nickname of “The Elf in a Gecko Suit” was how the media reported her during the Monkey Business run. She has Blandness and regularly wears a chameleon suit, so this was how witness’s vague memories were reported in an easy to remember sound bite. Krombopulos Michael has the Elf Poser negative quality, even though that is normally restricted to Humans Only. It was too strong a story element to let the rules get in the way.]
[Note that the above does mean that the group has an elf orc-poser and an orc elf-poser. Along with an androgynous Korean sword saint, a cyber-ed shaman who speaks in the third person, a street samurai with a chainsaw, and a lawyer who does rigging on the side, The Fin has a typical odd-ball group of runners that represents the cream of what first time fixers have access to. Think about the 26 other runners she turned away as not good enough or too strange and what that implies about them.]
[The real run will kick off on Wednesday, March 4, 2076. It will be Ash Wednesday. My character is excited about that, for obvious reasons. Oh, and yes, I did speak in third person while role-playing Ash. It took a couple of tries for The Fin's player to keep a straight face while talking to Ash. Much fun.]
Session 2
[This session happened November 9th.]
The next run is going to be different from previous runs in that one of the main player characters will be the Mr. Johnson for a secondary team of runners. Therefore, we spent the session building discussing what the run would require and building new characters to cover that. We also decided each player would build a character different from their primary to keep people out of a gaming rut. This also provides a chance for players to learn new sections of the rules.
The source of the run is back in run number 5: A Dwarf in Need. The client (and eventual target), Sam, owned a collection of 65 vehicles, many of which were antiques or merely high-end prestige cars. Once The Fin saw them, her heart was set on owning several of them. Not making enough money as a shadowrunner to simply buy them, she decided to take a page from the Mr. Johnson Playbook and hire shadowrunners to steal them for her. To make the job pay for itself plus show a nice profit, she plans on having runners steal the entire collection, which she will sell off to buyers on the dark net or chop shops in Seattle able to handle the action.
This is not a run she wants the Pleiades Group associated with as it clashes with the group's growing reputation as quality shadowrunners for hire. If clients even thought that the Pleiades Group might use jobs to scout for potential valuables to steal like common criminals, they would think twice about hiring the Group. So plausible deniability requires a whole separate crew…
We are still sticking with the Shadowrun 5th Edition Core Rules and none of the additional books for character builds. We didn’t finish all the characters at the session, particularly names, but this is what we have on tap:
Ash – human male mage/rigger
Ash is a “car shaman” who follows the “spirit of the road”. He sacrificed two points of Essence/Magic for some alpha-grade augmentations: a Rating 1 Control Rig, a Rating 1 Synaptic Booster, and a Rating 2 Muscle Toner along with a standard Cat’s Eyes bioware upgrade. He bought back his lost two points of Magic and starts with 5 spells: Silence, Physical Mask, Improved Invisibility, Detect Law Enforcement Badge, and Detect Security System.
Ash is smuggler, running cargoes across the North Plains and the Rocky Mountains in a Rover Model 2072, crossing the borders of the UCAS, the Sioux Nation, the Salish-Shidhe Council, and the Seattle Metroplex. Ash was raised on the border between the UCAS and the Sioux Nation and speaks both English and Lakota as a native-speaker. Rumor has it that Ash once served in the military (stories vary on whether it was the UCAS or Sioux military) and received his augmentations before his magic manifested. His augmentations somewhat interfere with his magic and as a result his astral signature is weaker than normal and fades quickly (Astral Chameleon). One or the other also seems to have affected his mind and Ash only speaks of himself in the third person. He also has a Moderate addiction to Long Haul, a side effect of both his profession and his magical calling. [As the amount of backstory suggests, this is my character.]
Roadrunner – elf female rigger raised by orcs
Roadrunner (known as Tweety to her family only) is a straight up rigger with a serious need for speed, both on the road and in person.
Roadrunner’s parents were killed when she was very young in a spasm of anti-metahuman violence that claimed the lives of a number of metahuman types. As a result, she was raised by orcs and self-identifies as an orc (Orc Poser negative quality), to the extent she’s had tusks implanted. She is a rough and tumble person due to her upbringing and her need for speed is rooted here – punch the other person first and they have a painful bloody nose to deal with before they can hit back. Played by The Fin's player.
Krombopulos "Krom" Michael – orc male physical adept B&E specialist with a thing for elves
Krom (as nearly everyone calls him) specializes in bypassing security systems and will be necessary for reconnaissance and access to the site of the job. He’s an Elf Poser - don’t know why yet, but he and Roadrunner should get along like cats and dogs.
[His player is still developing Krombopulos's personality and back ground. Played by Sin’s player]
Limbsaw – human female street samurai
Limbsaw has Japanese/American ancestry. Her preferred weapons are a monofilament chainsaw and an Ares Alpha. Street gangs in her neighborhood have a "Limbsaw Identification" knowledge skill so they don't hassle the wrong woman and end up nick-named "Lefty". She works as a body disposal expert on the side and requires clients supply the plastic drop-cloths. Played by Void's player.
Seuo-ki – androgynous human swordperson
Seuo-ki is Korean and carries a sword that Seuo-ki is an expert with. Seuo-ki wanders the mean streets searching for Seuo-ki's next paycheck.
[Seuo-ki is played by Murdoc's player and will develop personality during play.]
Alfonz – human male Decker/Lawyer
Alfonz is either a lawyer who fell into decking or a decker who learned enough about the system to practice law. Either way, he’s for hire and will help with title transfers and stalling the probate court.
[Full details to be updated once I have them – played by Killroy’s player and GM for the run, which allows us to NPC decking and speed that way up]
The last two PCs are entirely unknown right now as the players couldn’t make the game session and are building their characters between sessions. I'll post them here once I have information on them.
Session 1 [Not Yet Written]
UPDATE: Added Seuo-ki and updated Limbsaw and Krombopulos Michael. 11/17.