GURPS Shadowrun

[Bira]

Finally, I have a game worth writing an actual play about! I've been GMing a D&D campaign for nearly a year now, but it's the Scales of War adventure path, so there isn't much to tell about it that isn't already out there in PDF form. It's fun, but I can see myself getting sick of it, so I've long thought about having an alternate game going on at the same time to "cleanse my palate", so to speak. I had tried to start a SR4 game before, but that didn't get a lot of traction from the players. I had also been reading my pile of GURPS 4 books for a while, itching to start something that would give me an excuse to use books like High Tech and Martial Arts. Eventually, my addled brain managed to connect the dots. Why not GURPS Shadowrun? GURPS can do all the elements from Shadowrun just fine, and, when you look at the SR4 rules long enough, you start to realize they really want to be GURPS when they grow up.

So I cobbled together a home-brewed conversion from bits and pieces found around the Internet, and managed to get three players from my regular D&D group to agree to show up on a Saturday for the game by promising to take care of all the rules myself, and create the characters according to their specifications. This is what we ended up with:

Minnie-May Hopkins, a face/demolitions expert, played by my wife. Yes, it's the character from Gunsmith Cats, faithfully transcribed to Shadowrun. No, it's not original, but yes, it's fun. And it beats a Wolverine clone any day. She's a 18-year old girl who ran away from home a few years ago and soon after hooked up with a demolitions expert named Kenichi Takizawa, living happy as a clam until he disappeared in Crash 2.0. She wandered aimlessly through life for a while, working on a Triad-owned brothel to make ends meet (you see, she's a bit of a nympho), until she heard a rumor that Ken might be alive and grew obsessed with finding him. She now employs her own demolition skills as a shadowrunner, in the hopes that she'll obtain enough connections to track him down. Her defining disadvantages are an Obsession with finding Ken and Lecherousness triggered mainly by people who resemble him.

Larry "Cassius" Vincent, a troll mercenary. Despite the name (which I picked because I thought it would be funny), this one is an original character. He was a Special Forces soldier until Crash 2.0 hit, where he was part of one of the big assaults against Winternight and one of their nukes. Not only was he left for dead, he was the sole survivor of his unit. Not the most liked person in the service, he reasoned they would try to pin all those casualties on him, and thought it better to vanish into the shadows rather than go back to his old life. His squadmates were his only family, and he still blames himself for their deaths. Besides being scary in combat, Cassius is an interesting study in contrasts: he adheres to the Soldier's Code of Honor of always completing the mission, but that tough hide of his hides a heart of gold. He's Charitable, with a Sense of Duty to his teammates and a Guilt Complex that would kick in if anything bad happened to them.

Marcus, a human technomancer. His player asked to play one of "those guys who can hack with their minds", saying he wanted to be "a bit like Neo", i.e, a god inside the Matrix and kinda useless outside it. So that's exactly what he is, except that his player can't know precisely how good he is at hacking because Marcus is a Dead Broke Total Amnesiac. "Marcus" is just a nickname he came up with so people would call him something other than "Hey, you!" Also, please note the starting date of the game is 2069, so the public at large has absolutely no clue about the existence of technomancers.

There's a lot of interesting pulished storylines for SR4, and I decided I would run the Denver Shadowrun Missions. I know what you're thinking, if D&D Scales of War isn't worth APing because it's a published campaign, why would these Missions be? Well, the thing is the Shadowrun setting is like an old, comfortable pair of shoes to me at this point. I'm confident in my ability to tweak it and making these published adventures into my own thing.

So we sat around the table, and the game began.

Story 1: Parliament of Thieves

Parliament of Thieves is the first of the Denver missions. It's a total cakewalk, meant to get the runners acquainted with the city itself and with some of the major NPCs therein. There aren't any surprises here - get a package from Point A to Point B. Someone attacks the couriers on the way, but that happens in 99% of all RPG courier missions, so it's not a surprise at all.

The first order of the day was to make the runners meet each other. The standard way to do this is to make them get independent calls from a contact and meet at the same place for a briefing. That basically boils down to "You all meet in a bar", and is so very cliche. Therefore, I decided to start things on a more lively note.



Scene 1: Getaway

Marcus woke up to the masked face of a doctor. He wanted to speak, but his mouth was dry. He wanted to move, but his arms and legs were tied. Looking around, he saw a cramped space full of blinking machines, crowded with the afore-mentioned doctor and an armed, armored guy. Everything was shaking terribly, as if an earthquake was going on. "Shit, he woke up," said the doctor. Then there was a tremendous blast, and the world turned upside down.

Meanwhile, things were not going very well for Cassius and Minnie-May. They had known each other and worked together for a while, and their latest mission was to act as bodyguards for a Triad bigwig in a delicate negotiation with some Mafiosi. The mobsters in question had other plans, however, and in a surprise ambush managed to ice the Triad dude. The two unfortunate (and now unpaid) shadowrunners were now running for their lives in their late client's limo, being chased by a car full of angry mobsters with assault rifles. May was driving, while Cassius tried to shoot back at their pursuers.

Of course, it was just their luck that they would run into another shootout, as they entered a slightly wider street. Maneuvering a limo is tricky business, and it just so happened that May ended up nearly ramming an Unmarked Black Van from which had popped out what seemed to be a corporate hit squad, shooting at another corporate hit squad currently guarding a crashed ambulance. Not long after, the pursuing mobsters, which aren't quite as lucky, do ram the limo.

There was utter chaos. Both hit squads were convinced the newcomers were reinforcements for the enemy, and the end result was that everyone was shooting at everyone else while attempting to beat a tactical retreat. Our heroes do avoid getting killed through the judicious application of assault rifle rounds and strobe grenades. Just as they're about to leave, though, Cassius notices a guy tied up inside the remains of the limo! He just couldn't live with himself if he left the defenseless SOB to die there, so he rescues him just as the ambulance is about to explode.

And so the group is formed!

Back at Cassius' safe house, they try to figure out who this guy they just rescued is, as well as what they'll do to escape the wrath of both the Mafia and the Triad.

Cassius: "Who are you?"
Marcus: "I... I don't know!"

After some more cliche amnesia dialogue, Cassius decided it would be best to leave Seattle ASAP, and invites the other two to go with him. He then calls his fixer, Pollux, to explain the situation and ask for a quick ticket out of town. Pollux agrees he should leave, but setting up a quick and discrete getaway for the three of them ends up eating through all of Cassius' remaining money. They end up flying to Denver on a smuggler's T-Bird, sharing the already meager space on the vehicle's cargo hold with several boxes of contraband.

Scene 2: The Meet

To those not familiar with Shadowrun's Denver, it's a fun place. The treaty that gave over half of North America back to the natives and their sympathizers in 2018 was signed here, and as a result the city itself was divided, pie-like, between the five signatory nations. Over time, secessions, mergers and that thing with the dragon back in '61 changed this number to four: the Pueblo Corporate Council, the Sioux Nation, UCAS, and the CAS (for the last two, think "Union" and "Confederacy"). Each sector is surrounded by heavily-guarded walls and border checkpoints, making normal everyday movement through town really fun for people who customarily lack IDs and carry illegal ordnance around.

There is some time compression here, as our group lands on the PCC sector and proceeds to find a place to live over the next few days, eventually settling for a somewhat crummy apartment in the Lakewood neighborhood. During this time, Marcus notices he can sorta talk to machines, and see Augmented Reality displays and such without the need for video glasses or commlinks. May notices it too, but decides to keep quiet about it. It looks a little unusual, but it could just be that the guy has an implanted commlink. Some time later, they get a call from Cassius, who says he pulled a few markers and got them a job. Mr. Johnson is going to meet them at the nearby Denim Bar shortly.

The Denim is very popular with the factory workers living nearby, and is also decorated in traditional Pueblo style. After talking to the bartender about the appointment with Mr. Johnson, the group is directed to a room in the back. The room contains a traditional Pueblo firepit, and seated beside it is Mr. Johnson, whose real name is Mark Longfeather, one of the three Koshari bigwigs in Denver. He wears a gray suit and a traditional Raven mask, both to hide his features and as a symbol of his station with the Koshari.

"Mr. Johnson" is shadowrunner slang for the people who hire shadowrunners. The Koshari are a Native American crime syndicate who is very active on Denver. They own much of the underworld on the Pueblo and Sioux sectors.

Longfeather has a delicate assignment for them: deliver an important package across town. Other people are sure to want this package very much, so there will be danger involved. Do they accept? Of course they do, being just about out of money.

The package is a fancy envelop sealed with wax. It's supposed to be delivered to a Sottocapo Chavez, of the Chavez mafia, who lives in the UCAS sector, two borders away. Payment is $2500 for each of the three runners, which they promptly accept without further negotiations. Longfeather hands them the envelope and the contact numbers of two "coyotes", who specialize in smuggling people and goods across each of those borders. They have three hours to complete the delivery.

They leave the bar, package in hand, and hail a cab. There wasn't any time to bring any large possessions such as cars from Seattle, so this is the best they can do for now. On the way to the border checkpoint, they contact the first coyote, a grumpy old orc who sets up a rendezvous point a few blocks away from the wall separating Pueblo from CAS. They get the cabby to drop them off there, and pay for the ride. The orc eventually shows up and leads them through an extensive network of abandoned tunnels that runs under the wall. He says these were left over from the Aztlan sector, and that there may still be a few holdouts hiding in there. There is much paranoia about ambushes in the dark, but nothing happens. As they emerge on the other side, their guide says that this one was a freebie, but they better pay for the service next time. He walks away muttering curses against that "damn blackmailer...".

Scene 3: Burly Brawl

With plenty of time to spare, they hail another cab and head towards the CAS-UCAS border. Along the way, though, they run into a massive traffic jam! As they start to ask for an alternate route from their driver, several well armed people start emerging from a couple of nearby buildings. There's two distinct groups - an all-human Yakuza party, and a mixed-race Triad posse led by a very large troll mage. This worries them, and encrypted messages start flowing through their commlinks. Cassius has a plan - he'll get out and distract the interlopers, while the others hijack the cab's system and try to find a way out of there. The cabby is useless at this point, reduced to cowering and praying for his life.

Cassius gets out of the cab, and a tense negotiation begins. Both parties want the envelope and are quite willing to kill for it. However, they consider themselves civilized people, and so would like to trade for it before things get ugly. The thing is, neither Johnny Ono (the head Yakuza thug and a gun adept) nor An-Peng (the troll) knew the other party would be here as well, so now it looks like things have a higher chance of turning ugly than what was expected. As Ono and An-Peng start a tense bidding war for the envelope, and Cassius pretends to be interested, Marcus tries to talk the car into handing the controls over to May's commlink.

Marcus: "Please transfer your controls."
Car: "ACCESS DENIED".
Marcus: "YOU WILL OBEY ME!"
Car: "yessir."

May, as the only member of the group who's any good at driving, now has her chance to shine. Which she blows by failing to maneuver cleanly out of the traffic jam, and hitting a nearby vehicle. It is at this point that both Johnny and An-Peng realize they've been had, and start a three-way fight. That's no good at all for Cassius, who's alone out there, so May throws one of her strobe grenades before starting the car up again and resuming her maneuvers.

The grenade works better than intended - everyone is stunned and blinded, including Cassius! So, while May now has a clean path for a getaway, she has to wait for her teammate to recover. Unfortunately for her, Johnny Ono recovers first. Angry but confident, he draws his gun, strides up to Cassius, points it at his forehead, and pulls the trigger.

Click! Showing remarkable ingenuity, Marcus had spoofed a command to his smartlinked gun and engaged its safety! While Ono wastes a turn unlocking his gun again, Cassius has enough time to recover and somehow jump back into his seat. The cab speeds away.

Scene 4: Delivery

They leave the terrified cabby with a fat "hazard" bonus on top of his normal fare, and rendezvous with the other coyote. The border crossing is much the same as before, only this time the coyote, a middle-aged woman called Peaches, is a lot friendlier. She also uses a set of tunnels, these ones dating back to the 20th century, and points out the smuggler bar hidden down there about halfway through. As they leave the tunnels on the UCAS side, they call yet another cab, and head towards their final destination There is a slight run-in with a hacker named Dean Costello, who offers them a pittance to scan the envelope, but they refuse and move on.

This neighborhood seems much nicer - large mansions sit well back from the road, walled and fenced. All is not well on the road itself, however, as the Fronts go-gang has picked tonight for their initiation rituals, which consist of driving some poor unfortunate out of the road. And the only car on the road is their taxi. The Fronts turn out to be pushovers, though, and leave as Cassius pops a few of their tires with his gun.

Finally, they arrive at Chavez's estate, announce themselves at the gate, and go in. They are directed to the mansion's shooting range, where they find the elderly sottocapo intimidating an elf by using him as a target practice aid. He receives the envelope, pays the runners, and thanks them. As Cassius comments that the target practice thing was maybe a bit harsh, Chavez chuckles and retorts that maybe he should pursue another line of business, if he's so squeamish.

Money in hand, the group returns home.

And that's the end of both the first session, and the first story. As you can see, I suck at denouements.

The envelope contained a hand-written treaty between the Koshari and the Chavez mafia, allowing the mob to keep running the Lakeside Amusement Park casino in Pueblo. The treaty is renewed every year, and this time the runners had been chosen to deliver it. The Yakuza and the Triads wanted to disrupt it by getting the document for themselves. Costello belongs to another Mafia family, the Casquilhos, who were simply curious as to the precise terms of the treaty.

Besides the monetary and XP rewards, the group also got the chance to purchase Peaches and Longfeather as contacts. They were friendly enough to the one, and the other was impressed enough with their efficiency to personally call and thank them later.

Tune in soon for Story 2: Best Served Cold!

 

[Bira]

Story 2: Best Served Cold

Here we are again, with the second session (and second run) of my GURPS Shadowrun campaign. In case it was not obvious in my last post, I'll copy DaveB and use blue text for out of character notes. Here we play the second of the Denver missions, "Best Served Cold", where things get a little more complex. This run has some issues, but I think I managed to get around them handily and the players had a good time in the end. More details below.

Only Minnie-May and Marcus take part in it, because Cassius's player couldn't make it.


Scene 1: Moping

As we open the curtain, we see Marcus and May in the crummy apartment they share in Lakewood. Since the last run, they've basically spent a week surfing the Internet (pardon, the Matrix). Marcus has been looking for any clues as to what he might be, while May has been looking for her long-lost boyfriend. Neither had much success, though Marcus did find a lot of articles about a mental disease called AIPS (or, more colloquially, "the Apes"), which affected many people who had been jacked in at the time of the Crash. For some reason, that seemed important to him, though he couldn't tell why. He decides to look for a doctor on the yellow pages, and schedules a neural scan on a nearby clinic for the next week. May, which couldn't find even a piddly clue, now spent her time eating copious amounts of ice cream. Marcus asked her what she had been looking for, but she refused to answer. As for Cassius the troll, he had left the previous day and hadn't shown up yet.

May used some of her money from the last run to replace her used grenade, and Marcus used his to buy some decent clothes and a decent commlink. He doesn't actually need one for most things except for the storage space, but appearances have to be kept. His previous one had been a 30-year old watch found on a dumpster, and that just wouldn't do. So now he's looking all dapper in an all-white suit and duster combo and rose-tinted John Lennon glasses. Alas, it would not last.

They get a call May answers, and is cordially greeted by a catgirl. A snappily-dressed, furry, cat-eared woman, actually who introduces herself as "Tabby" and tells them that Pollux passed her their references. There's a job waiting for them if they're willing, which they are. "It's a pity that your troll friend is unavailable, but maybe he wouldn't fit into this job very well. Go to this address and talk to the Johnson.", says Tabby. "Pack light. Don't worry about me, I've already got my finder's fee."

Tabby is a "changeling", one of the people who was magically mutated by the passage of Halley's comet in 2061.

Scene 2: The Meet


I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of the "Meet" as used by most Shadowrun adventures. I mean, it's perfectly logical for there to be a briefing and negotiation session before every mission by a bunch of freelance criminals, but after you've done it a few times, it all starts to feel very repetitive and formulaic. Maybe it's because most of the examples I've seen outside of my own games are from PbP's that make a very complicated ritual out of them, with individual posts for every call setting up the meet, detailed descriptions of everyone arriving, and the fact that it always seems to happen in a bar or restaurant of some sort. I plan on eventually escaping the Meet when I leave the beaten path and start running my own stories.

This time the meet is not on a bar or restaurant, for once, but on an actual, honest-to-goodness horse ranch on the outskirts of the Pueblo sector, which the entrance sign proudly states is owned by Falcone Corporate Consultants. They're greeted by a stern fellow named Hafiz, who escorts them to a stable beside the main house. Mr. Johnson is Jarón Falcone himself, a dignified older man in a wheelchair, waiting at the stable. He explains that his main business line "these days" is executive retreats in the ranch, with team-building exercises and such, and that several megacorps are his clients. However, some horrible happened on the previous day - the head of R&D for Ares in Denver, who was staying at the ranch, was kidnapped!

Falcone says that they only noticed something was amiss at about 8:30AM on that same day, when the ranch's node detected an intrusion attempt and went into alert. The audit that followed uncovered a few video records 5AM, and showed three human or elven women in tribal masks and form-fitting armor breaking into Belenkiy's room. At 9AM, an anonymous message arrived, demanding that an absurd ransom payment be deposited in a certain numbered account in 24 hours, or news of the kidnapping would be spread far and wide, ruining Falcone's reputation. The runners' job, therefore, is to find the kidnappers, bring Belenkyi back, and if possible find out who had sent the ransom demand. Payment would be $5000 each, with half up front. Again, this payment was accepted without much negotiation. Any money is good money, after all.

Scene 3: The Crime Scene

With the briefing complete, Falcone instructs Hafiz to take the runners into Belenkyi's room, which has been left undisturbed since they found out about the kidnapping. The place is all tossed up - the bed is unmade, all drawers have been pulled out, clothes and personal objects were scattered everywhere. The scent of patchouli hung heavy in the suite, coming from an ashtray in the bathroom filled with clove cigarretes.

May and Marcus set about investigating the place, and the first thing that becomes obvious to them is that nothing of value seems to have been removed, other than Belenkyi himself. Marcus finds his commlink (whose form-factor is a pair of over-the-top mirrorshades) on the dresser, and manages to bypass its many protections in order to take a look inside. There aren't any clues, but he saves some top secret research files for, er, future reference. May's eyes are drawn to an obsidian dagger stuck on the wall above the bed. She climbs on the bed to take a better look at it, and sees that while it looks Aztec in style, it's more a piece of gift-shop junk than a true ceremonial object. She calls for Marcus to get a second opinion, and as he also climbs on top of the bed, he displaces one of the pillows, revealing another object hidden beneath it.

This object is a black crow's feather wrapper in leather string, something that's more reminiscent of Native American culture than anything that has to do with Aztlan. Figuring they have enough clues, the pair decides to leave the ranch and ask around a bit. Their investigation ends up determining that the obsidian knife really is a mass-produced fake, but that the feather is linked to a group of Denver shadowrunners known as the Black Cats. One of their members seems to have a compulsion to leave it as a trademark in the places they break into. This information is provided by none other than Mark Longfeather, who remembers hiring them for a couple of jobs in the past. He says they can be found at a bar called the Hardpan, on the Sioux sector. Marcus, who had been the one to talk to Longfeather, calls May and tells her to meet him there.

Scene 4: The Hardpan

May googles the place to find its address, and ends up also finding out that it's frequented mostly by Sioux "warriors", who range from off-duty soldiers to shadowrunners, and that the owner has a strong bias against non-Sioux. So she decides to drop by her home first, break out her disguise kit, and become Sioux for a while.

That's another bout of surprising ingenuity from my players. I love it when they do that.

Marcus gets to the Hardpan first, and enters the bar with his white clothes and whiter skin, drawing dozens of hostile looks and causing an ominous silence to descend on the room. Suddenly, a barely recognizable Sioux girl shoves him aside and says:

May (in disguise): Don't worry guys, he's with me!

This causes business as usual to resume. The pair then heads to the bar proper, where a hard-bitten Sioux woman watches them a bit warily with her cybereyes. "What do you want?" she asks, addressing May and ignoring Marcus completely.

May: I heard you could find the Black Cats here.
Jennifer Sundancer (the barwoman): So?
May: I need to talk to them, you know?
Sundancer: About what?
May: That's a secret!

At this point I rolled a Reaction Roll for ol' Jennifer, taking into account that May was fairly cute, which grants a small bonus, and that she was Pitiable, which grants a much larger bonus when she's asking for help. This is basically the case here. She got a Very Good reaction to May.

Sundancer smiles. "Okay, little girl. Wait here." She vanishes out the back door for a couple of minutes, and then comes back. "I've set up a meet with one of them. Be at this address in an hour."

This is a bit more than what May was expecting, so she thanks the bartender and leaves with Marcus. They go to the meeting place, an abandoned park, and she waits for the Black Cat envoy while Marcus hides in some nearby bushes. The woman arrives on a bike fifteen minutes before the appointed time, approaches May warily, and asks her what she wants.

"Relax, I just want to talk," says May. "I have a job for you!" And with that, she produces... a child's lunchbox. "I want you to deliver this box to an address I'll give you!"

The other shadowrunner, a human woman named Kyra Blackfoot, doesn't buy it. "No, REALLY, what do you want?", she asks. "No, REALLY, that's it." answers May. She's not very convincing, but manages to keep Kyra talking long enough for Marcus to hack into her commlink and instruct it to send him a homing signal every 2 minutes. Frustrated with the improductive meeting, Kyra excuses herself rather brusquely and leaves, completely unaware that she will lead the runners into her hideout.

And that was another stroke of genius by my players. They rock. Even Marcus' player, who normally gets a little confused with all the numbers in the D&D game, was in top form for this one, which means not giving him access to his character sheet actually makes him better.

Scene 5: Lair of the Mary Sues

This is as good a place as any to tell you a little about the Black Cats. You see, the author of this adventure goes to great, creepy lengths to tell you all about the Black Cats, and this "mystical bond of trust and friendship"/"sworn brotherhood" thing they have going. No NPC who tells the runners about them will fail to mention it, nor will the author whenever the opportunity presents itself. He goes a little further still, though, actually levying a XP penalty on groups that fail to deal with them in a peaceful and friendly manner, despite the fact that they are in direct opposition to them in this run. And now you know why I call them the Mary Sues.

I will be having none of that here, of course. "Let the chips fall where they may" goes both ways.

May and Marcus park their rented car a few blocks away from the place Marcus' beacon indicates Kyra has stopped at. It's a dinky coffin hotel, so decrepit the building is actually leaning, like the tower of Pisa. It's one of those places that explicitly announces "no questions asked" on a sign near the front door, along with stuff like "air is free, electricity costs extra." Behind the reception desk is an elf that looks more like a ferret than one of the scions of Galadriel. They ask him for a room, and get one on the second floor, along with a minimap on their AR overlays indicating where it is and a sly wink from the weasel.

Guy + pretty girl + single coffin... Now there's something they hadn't noticed!

The minimap comes in handy - crossing it with the homing beacon, they find out their quarry is in the third floor, directly above their rented coffin. So they climb up to the second floor, listening to the faint voices above, and plan. The layout of each floor is identical - a single corridor, festooned with "coffins", with the stairs on one side and a window on the other. There seems to be no one else on the building, and Matrix connections are mighty spotty here, which causes Marcus some stress for reasons he can't identify. It does make it a little easier to lock onto the wireless signals for the Black Cats' commlinks, and so what they decide to do is to turn all of them off at the same time, and then launch a two-pronged attack, with May tossing grenades into the third floor window and Marcus shooting from the stairs with his holdout pistol (the only weapon he has!).

This plan is better than it sounds.

Marcus spends a while focusing on the task of taking control of all four commlinks, and eventually manages to shut them all down simultaneously! There are screams of confusion above, and so each runner charges to his appointed route. Marcus rounds the corner to the third floor stairs and sees a woman, one of the Black Cats, sitting there, obviously surprised and confused, but not enough to prevent her from acting first! She trains a monster pistol on Marcus and fires, but fortunately he manages to dodge back behind the wall just in time. He returns fire with his own gun, missing entirely. Another woman runs up to the stairs, and fills them with lead from her PDW, but Marcus is still safe behind the wall. The two Black Cats start retreating while laying down covering fire, joining her sisters at the other end of the hallway. All of them start retreating towards them window, carrying a tied-up Belenkyi with them.

It is then that May leans out of the second floor window and throws a strobe grenade through the very same window they were approaching! Cue heavily penalized HT rolls all around, everyone becoming temporarily stunned and blinded, and with Kyra and the woman with the monster pistol getting a faceful of epileptic seizure (that's what happens when you fail your HT roll too badly when resisting the effects of a strobe grenade). This gives Marcus enough time to run up to them, just as the PDW-armed Black Cat starts recovering. He points his gun at her head, says "Sorry, babe.", pulls the trigger... and misses, having shot too early. The same doesn't happen with his opponent, as she fires a quick burst from her PDW and one of the bullets strikes Marcus on the torso.

Hearing gunfire above, May decides to get serious and toss a real frag grenade, set to explode in a few seconds. The poor Black Cat shaman recovers from her stun just in time to see the new grenade lands right next to her. "Gre-gre-gre-grenade!" This distracts the other one for long enough for Marcus to lift Belenkyi on his shoulders and, running on pure adrenaline, carry him to the other end of the hallway and down the stairs. Somewhere along the way the grenade explodes, but by then he's far enough away not to suffer any damage. He and May hightail it out of there.

They got who they came for, which is good, but Marcus is bleeding all over his nice new clothes, which is bad. May manages to bandage him using strips of his own shirt, but the can't do anything else since she doesn't have a medkit handy. Luckily, it was just a grazing hit, so now that the bleeding stopped he can wait a bit longer for proper medical attention.

The Sioux-Pueblo border crossing is... interesting, to say the least, but May manages to fast-talk the guard into believing she's driving her drunk father and his friend home. On the way to the ranch, Belenkyi awakens, and thanks the runners after hearing about the rescue attempt from them. Marcus manages to quietly slip Belenkyi's commlink back into its owner's pocket.

Upon arriving they're taken directly to Falcone, who thanks them for a job well done. While they didn't manage to discover who was the mastermind behind the crime, they did rescue the hostage, so any bad news he decides to air about the kidnapping can quickly be debunked both by Falcone and by Belenkyi himself. With some 12 hours before the ransom deadline, Falcone decides to use his own resources to track the blackmailer down. He even throws in a proper first aid treatment by Hafiz as a bonus!

Again, with money in hand, they return home. Later, a grateful Tabby compliments them on their efficiency, and promises future work.



The Black Cats are composed of two combat monsters, a face, a shaman, and absolutely zero hackers, which is part of the reason things went so bad for them against two non-combat-optimized characters. The other part is that the runners happened to find a plan that would very effectively counter the Mary Sues' own - the adventure PDF says they would lay down covering fire on the stairs, and retreat through the window by using levitation spells from the shaman. That's not a such a good idea when someone starts throwing grenades through that same window.

Despite completing the mission very effectively, the PCs didn't even scratch the Machiavellian depths of the plot, most of which is admittedly irrelevant to the task at hand. You see, Belenkyi was rising very rapidly on the ranks of Ares because he had a deal with the Casquilho Mafia - they got to field test his latest prototypes, and in turn his competition suffered very convenient accidents on a regular basis. So Ares hired the Mary Sues to kidnap him and interrogate him for 48 hours without torture, in order to see how much he would spill and thus test his loyalty to the company.

The ransom demands were actually made by a disgruntled hacker named Hammerjack, who went into a run set up by Falcone back in his fixer days, and got his brain fried by Ares psychotropic IC. He just happened to learn of the kidnapping when he broke into Falcone's node, and decided to take advantage of it by posting a fake ransom note. However, he failed to delete the evidence of the kidnapping, which led the PCs to the real black cats. He was supposed to contact the runners a midnight "after they failed to ascertain Belenkyi's location", but they didn't fail, and, in fact, managed to find out exactly where the hostage was way before midnight, so they never even heard of the guy. I guess one can truly be too good at one's job . There was a bonus for finding out who Hammerjack was, but it's no great loss that they didn't. He was thwarted, and that will be enough for now.

I did make a change to the XP awards in that my players got a point for dealing with the Black Cats one way or the other, rather than by trying to buddy up with them. Apparently, I must not have been the only one, because their survival in the official vote was by such a slim margin that they would not appear on the campaign again...

 

[Crakkerjakk]

If you'd like to send me your e-mail in a PM, I've converted all the SR4 guns and armor in the core book to GURPS stats.

How are you dealing with the technomancer? I was going to use the Machine Telepathy stuff from Psionic Powers.

 

[Bira]

PM sent. I would love to see those converted stats .

I'm currently mostly using the "generic" weapons and armor from Ultra-Tech, and I've made Armor Jackets and Lined Dusters using the Tailored Armor rules contained therein. One thing I've noticed is that something like a TL9 Tactical Vest with plates gives characters DR 52 against bullets, or something crazy like that. I guess aiming at the head just become a lot more attractive than it already is.

For the technomancer, I'm pretty much using the Ergokinesis rules from Psionic Powers as written. Most computers in my campaign are fairly powerful (a typical commlink is Complexity 6), so high skill levels are recommended.

 

[Bira]

Story 3: Dead Girl Hacking

A couple of days before Marcus's appointment with the doctor, Tabby calls them again, with another job offer.

Tabby: Hello, guys! I know it's only been a few days, but since you handled that kidnapping case so well, I have something here that will fit you just right!

This piques the interest of most of the group.

Marcus: Hey, what about my appointment?
May: Don't worry, we'll be done with this way before it comes up!


We were going to play through that today, but Cassius' player brought a friend to show him what the game was like. So I quickly adapted the storyline to fit an extra character in, and decided to put Marcus' personal storyline on hold for a little while longer. The rest of the adventure would tie into it anyway.


Cassius, May, and Marcus to the CAS sector, and after sweating a bit at the border crossing, meet their client at a small café in Englewood, in the University district. He's a very laid back, but somewhat distraught university student, who reeks of marijuana and introduces himself as Damien. He has a problem, you see. His girfriend is a hacker, and she sometimes hangs around rough crowd, doing some illegal jobs here and there. And this time she took a job that was a little too much for her - she ended up dead from the security measures of whatever system she had been paid to hack. And, when DocWagon was carting her body away, someone actually attacked the ambulance and took the body away! He doesn't know what she was doing, or who took the body, but he wants it back, so it can have "a proper burial and stuff". He'd pay $8000 for the team to find and retrieve it, but he wanted to go along with them. This makes our protagonists a bit wary, until Damien tells them his major is Thaumaturgy, and he can do "magic and stuff", specializing on messing around with people's minds.

Cassius just can't resist a good sob story, and so they accept Damien's terms. Marcus is soon able to find some "breaking news" reports of a "shocking terrorist attack" on a DocWagon ambulance that morning, which, as it turns out, was carrying the body of Damien's girlfriend. According to the news report, the ambulance was taken to the central DocWagon office in the UCAS sector for forensic analysis. They decided to pay that office a visit in order to do their own forensic analysis.


Damien is the new character. He has Magery 1 and a few mind control spells, most notably Daze and Sleep, which saw the most use here.


The DocWagon building wasn't very large - it contained mostly administrative offices and a large underground parking garage with a couple built-in repair stations for their ambulances. Standard operating procedure was for the rescue teams to leave the building and take customers to the nearest available hospital, so they didn't need any on-site medical facilities. The team arrived there just after dark, and watched things for a while to get a feel for the place's layout and security. There were two main entrances - a standard reception area with automatic glass doors, and a large garage door with an automatic gate, currently locked. Inside the reception area, a bored receptionist and a single security guard were visible.

While May, Cassius and Damien debated possible avenues of approach, Marcus decided to get busy.

Marcus' Player: Do I detect any computers nearby?
Me: Yes. As usual, you detect hundreds of Matrix-enabled computers all around you, as far as you can sense.

Narrowing down his search a little, he decided to try his hand at hacking the building's security mainframe. No good, it was barely accessible from his position and refused him entry. Deciding to be a little more direct, he tried for the computer-controlled gate, also without avail. Both those systems would be closed to him for the next 24 hours, and that was time they just didn't have. So it would be up to the rest of the team to get them into the building.

Damien concentraded for a few seconds and, after an initial failed try, managed to cast a Daze spell on the receptionist, which imedatiely went into a happy haze and stopped noticing anything around her. "My turn!", xhirped May. After retouching her makeup a little, she went into the reception area and siddled up to the guard. "Misteeer", said she, in her best seductive pose, "I'm lost. Can you heeelp meee?". Unfortunately, looking 13 didn't help her much, and the guard asked her to leave saying that he wasn't interested in child prostitution. Her attempt wasn't totally in vain, however, as by going in she noticed a camera placed on one of the room's upper corners and was able to relay its location to her teammates via commlink. When the peaceful solution didn't work, Cassius stormed into the room and, careful not to get caught on tape, slammed the guard's head into the wall until he was knocked out. Taking a quick look at the slack-jawed receptionist's commlink, which was logged into the building's network, they managed to find floor plans for the garage, and headed immediately there.

They were almost able to sneak around the garage with impunity. Unfortunately, Marcus rolled a critical failure on his Stealth, and nearly ran into a mechanic. "Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?" Thinking quickly, the technomancer decided to try his hand at forgery - he would create fake police credentials on the fly and present it to the guy with an authentic sounding story. Unfortunately, and he had no way of knowing this, he wasn't particularly good at either of these skills, so the stick-figure drawing that introduced him as "Detective Lawman" was a bit of an embarassment. Luckily, Damien once again saved the day with a sleep spell that dropped the mechanic and left the mage barely able to stand from fatigue.

The group arrived at the repair station where the attacked ambulance had been at. It's "autodoc" drone was relatively intact, and they were able to recover a detailed log which revealed that Damien's girl had actually been revived on the way to the hospital, just before the attack! This definitely got the mage out of his stupor! A little physical searching revealed that the drone had a few tissue samples from her stored, so they took that. The samples would allow them to track her down via magic, but Damien, being a relative beginner, didn't know the proper ritual. However, he knew a "friend" who might be able to help. They left the building before any alarms rang and went in search of this person.


This concludes the third session. There was a fourth one, which will be up shortly, and will conclude the events of Dead Girl Hacking.

 

[Bira]

Story 3.2: Dead Girl Hacking

When we last left the group, they had just obtained a tissue sample for Damien's girlfriend (whose name I don't remember, but whom we'll call Helena on this AP). Damien knows it's possible to use a magic ritual to track someone from a tissue sample.

Marcus: Well, can you do it?
Damien: No, but I know a guy.

More like he knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. You see, Damien relies on a Triad contact to get him his, er, "special medicine", and he's heard the Triad is pretty good with magic. So, after a few desperate phone calls, he manages to score a meeting with a Triad mage in a Chinatown opium house.

The opium house itself is a wooden structure completely filled with strange-smelling smoke and assorted addicts using everything from old-fashioned opium to equally incapacitating BTLs. Taking care not to breathe in too deeply, they move towards a back room, where the mage is said to be awaiting them. That room is also filled with smoke, but the smell is distinctly different. As for the mage, well, he's none other than An-Peng, the troll that accosted them about two weeks ago in Story 1.

An-Peng: Do I know you?
Minnie-May: No sir!

Damien explains his predicament, and An-Peng remains unmoved. He says his time is expensive, so it will cost them $3.000 for him to leave his important duties aside and track down this girl. Without much choice, Damien pays him, which leaves Minnie-May wondering how much more they could have gotten for this job. After an hour or so, the troll wujen gives them a set of geographical coordinates.

Damien: So, where is this place?
An-Peng: Figure out for yourself. You only paid for the coordinates.

Figuring it out is easy, however - they just plug the coordinates into 2070's equivalent of Google Maps and get the address, which is a building inside the Aurora Warrens, the most lawless and derelict zone in Denver.

They leave the Triad and go to Aurora, arriving at what seems to be a large, abandoned commercial building. Cassius arms himself with his assault rifle and tactical vest, as he's finally in a place where they won't draw any unwanted attention, and the group starts climbing up the stairs and checking rooms. They see they're getting close when May notices a claymore set in one of the stairs, with a tripwire she just barely manages to warn Cassius about before he steps on it. She manages to disarm the bomb, and they keep going. Unfortunately, they don't spot the iBall sensor drone that's in the corridor ahead before it sees them and rolls back into one of the rooms, but Marcus manages to tap into its sensor feed and see the room, which is an old dentist's office, contains three armored guys with assault rifles and a girl tied to the dentist's chair.

What follows here is a very close-quarters shootout where, miraculously, no one dies, and the only real damage is done to Damian, who took a bullet to the torso that was mostly stopped by his vest. Through a combination of sleep spells, threats, and troll grappling, they manage to take the black ops squad out of the fight, and rescue Helena, who was in the process of being painfully interrogated and is now unconscious.

May calls Tabby and gets the address of a trustworthy street doctor for Damien and Helena, and while they get treated Cassius decides to interrogate the enemy he brought along. What he manages to get out of him is that he's part of a Mistuhama black ops squad, and he was retrieving information that was stolen from the company. After he sees that's all he's going to get out of the guy, Cassius knocks him out and ditches him.

They eventually get the rest of the story from Helena - she was hired by someone (never mind who) to grab some patient records from one of Denver's hospitals, for patients who had gone missing recently. It turns out all those patients had AIPS, and most of them had been enrolled on a Mitsuhama AIPS outreach program. Marcus gets very interested at this, because by now he's fairly sure he has AIPS, which he thinks is an explanation for his powers. Helena doesn't have anything else to say, though, and she thinks it's best for her and Damien to skip town fast, since Mistuhama is not likely to take this defeat lying down. Damien pays the group and thanks them profusely before the couple leaves, and the group decides to lie low for a while to avoid any corporate reprisals.

And this is as far as we've played. This latest adventure was an adapted form of the "Dead Man Hacking" hook from Emergence, and I'm quite proud of it because most of the details are mine. A few days after we had finished it, my daughter was born, so we are currently on hiatus, and will resume when she's a couple of months older.

Something I glossed over in the main AP body is that the group now have a vehicle! It's a van big enough to fit all of them, which May drives. They didn't have a lot of spare cash to buy it, though, limiting themselves mostly to the money May got from selling her subcompact car that had stayed behind in Seattle, so they got a clunker that's so old, rickety and decorated with hippie paraphernalia that it might as well be the original Mystery Machine. So, as they frantically move through Dever looking for the next clue on Helena's whereabouts, picture them driving around in that.

 

[Bira]

At last, we play again! My daughter is now old enough that I feel I can have a gaming group on the house safely, so I invited my GURPS SR players again.

Cassius' player couldn't make it for personal reasons, so I got another friend of mine to "sub" for him. My wife, who plays Mini-May, was overcome with sleep after taking care of a fussy baby all morning, so she didn't play either. Therefore, our group for this run consisted of Cassius (with a different player) and Marcus.

Prologue: Doctor's Appointment

It was finally time for Marcus' appointment with the doctor, so he had Cassius take him to the clinic on their decrepit van. The receptionist bore an uncanny resemblance to Jeanine from Ghostbusters, and the first thing she asked him was "do you have health insurance?". After paying in advance for the consultation, Marcus was admitted into Dr. Worthington's examination room. The good doctor was a tall. thin man with an impressive forehead and an utterly disinterested expression on his face.

Dr. Worthington: *sigh* What are you feeling?
Marcus: I'm feeling fine. I came here for a brain scan. I got amnesia, you see.
Dr. Worthington: *sigh* Oh well, since you've already paid for it, head over this way.

Marcus installed himself in the room's recliner/brain scanner combo, and the doctor activated the device from his commlink. The intense magnetic field felt kinda like someone was trying to unscrew his head from is body, but it only lasted a few seconds before shutting off.

The doctor looked at the resulting images from his commlink, and his expression grew increasingly astonished (and interested). He printed the images out, and showed them to Marcus. The doc explained that he had found some rather unusual biological structures on several places in his brain, structures the scanner's built-in implant database (which was quite up-to-date, thank you) couldn't identify as any known piece of bioware. Some of them were near the hippocampus, which could possibly have something to do with his memory loss. He'd have to examine those results more closely, of course, and would definitely need a follow-up appointment a month from then.

As Marcus left the examination room, he nabbed a digital copy of the images from Dr. Worthington's commlink, just for convenience (he already had the printouts with him). He scheduled the follow-up with Jeanine, and only after he had left the place did it occur to him that having his technomancer brain scanned and shown around in medical circles might not be the smartest idea after that whole Mitsuhama debacle from last run. He even considered bugging the doctor's office to see who he would contact before the follow-up, but since as he had no equipment and no way to discreetly break into the office at that moment, he gave up on it. They returned home, to find Minnie-May on a ice cream-fueled bout of depression, wearing her teddy-bear pajamas and refusing to leave her room. Since things had died down a little from the previous run, they decided that maybe it was time to look for a new job, since their whole life savings at the moment were a little under $8.000 each, and that's not a very large security blanket. More of a napkin, really.

So, for a change, they call Tabby up, and the catgirl fixer is delighted to see them back in action. You see, she has so many runs lined up they can even choose which one to take. So, what would it be, sabotage or extraction?

Marcus: Can't you tell us more about them?
Tabby: Sorry, no can do. Professional ethics, you know. Not that I don't trust you guys completely, of course, but I only tell details after a runner has committed to the job.

They end up going with the extraction job, which leads us to:

Story 4: The Grab

I actually got the job description wrong when I first had Tabby present them with the choice, and said "another missing persons case". After a few jokes by the players on how they were turning into the "rescue rangers", I looked at the adventure writeup and saw it was an extraction, which is basically turning someone into a missing person.

Yet again, the client has requested that they meet personally, in a restaurant. This time it's a dreadlocked Japanese woman, who tells them that the target is named Catherine Westmore, and slips a hardcopy photo of a 12-year-old half-Japanese girl across the table. They were to grab her at her school in the CAS sector in at most 3 days, and take her completely unharmed to an abandoned warehouse in the Aurora Warrens, where a second team would receive her. Payment was $14.000, with 10% up front and the rest on delivery to the second team. They accepted.

Looks like every published Shadowrun adventure ever says something to the effect of "if they refuse, thank them for their presence, pack up and leave". It doesn't work like that in my games - my shadowrunners always have the option of refusing, but they never get the full details until they commit to a job.

Marcus asks for more details about the girl, but the woman says she doesn't have any other info - that's why she's hiring them. After arranging all the details of the job, they hang around to finish the meal, and are somewhat pleasantly surprised to see that their employer is an actual human being, sticking around and making small talk. As they leave the restaurant together, however, she's accosted in the parking lot by three human thugs armed with heavy pistols, led by a large orc with a SMG. As they're about to fire, Cassius manages to drag the woman behind a nearby car. Marcus wants to try his trick of locking people's guns up, but decides to play it safe and find some cover instead.

The pistol-packing hoodlums are terrible shots and tend to either hit the car or miss by a mile. Their leader, however, lets loose with a full burst, and manages to nail both the lady and Cassius. Luckily, she's wearing armor, and so gets nothing more than a couple of bruises. The troll, however, gets nailed on his unprotected arm, which hurts like hell. His return fire just barely manages to hit the thug, who is also armored. He takes no damage, but the impact causes him to fall down. The lady takes this opportunity to aim her own shot and blow the thug's hand off as he tries to get up. Frightened, all of them leave as quickly as they can. There's no time for pursuit, though, as they start hearing sirens in the distance - a shootout in front of a family restaurant isn't the most discrete of activities. They quickly part ways, but not before their employer recommends them a good healer on CAS' Chinatown.

Lady Jade: Tell him Lady Jade sent you. Be careful not to throw that name around anywhere else.

Tune in tomorrow for the conclusion .

 

[Gaveriss]

Cool thread. I like that you are willing to adapt the 'runs from the printed materials. I'm not too familiar with Gurps, and not at all with 4e, but sounds like it's working well for you and your players. Oh yeah, I'm already subscribed and looking forward to more.

 

[Bira]

Thank you for your patronage .

 

[Bira]

The pair heads over to the address given to them by Lady Jade, and end up in front of a shop on CAS sector's Chinatown, whose sign proudly proclaims "Mystical Curiosities" are for sale. Behind the counter is Zhang Wong a middle-aged human in traditional wujen robes who goes all serious and hangs a closed sign on the door when he learns who sent the runners. He casts a healing spell on Cassius free of charge, and gives them his contact address, saying that if they're working for Lady Jade they must be good people. Again, the runners are kinda surprised at being treated this well by a total stranger, but it's a pleasant surprise. Marcus gets interested in the "Mystical Curiosities", which causes Zhang Wong to go into full salesman mode and expound on the many virtues of his wares. The technomancer ends up buying a pair of gold-plated meditation spheres for $500.

Now all healed up, they leave Wong's shop, and assess their options. Going back to their Pueblo safe house to plan the job doesn't look like it's worth it. They're not glib enough to fast-talk the guards at the border crossing, and the standard $300 coyote fee would quickly drain their funds if they kept going back and forth between sectors. It's cheaper to just rent a couple of coffin capsules on some cheap hotel and stay on the CAS until they accomplish the mission. After last time, Marcus makes it very explicit that they want two, coffins, separate from each other, to preempt any assumptions from the clerk.

Marcus hits the nets searching for information on Catherine, and after while manages to hit the jackpot and find the girl's blog and social network profiles. While she was careful enough not to broadcast her home address, she does mention she studies at Holm Elementary School, and from there it's easy to locate it on the Matrix and on a map of Denver. It's a fairly normal school. Classes are from 9am to 5pm*, which means the kids have already left today.

In my game, ubiquitous Matrix and augmented-reality technology means everyone has constant access to navigation software that's at least as good as a cross between Google Maps and a video game automap. Unless you're in a dead zone or something like that, you always know precisely where you are and can find the way to any other place given its name, address, or geographical coordinates. And instead of explaining how to arrive somewhere to other people. you just transfer a pre-packaged "waypoint" to them. There's all sorts of other AR tricks you can do, and none of them require a roll.

*: Also, I have no idea of what standard American school hours are. 9-to-5 was just the first thing that popped into my mind, so that's what I went with.

The building itself is fairly long, and has only one floor. There's a tall (3m) wall around it, with an iron gate that stays open throughout the day, but is now closed. After some deliberation, they actually decide to break into the place right then to try and find which room is Catherine's. They didn't prepare much beforehand, but hey, it's an elementary school, right? Fortunately, no one asked what could possibly go wrong. Marcus started by searching for transmission patterns around the school grounds that matched either sensors or personal commlinks, and managed to find out the motion sensors mounted around the wall's perimeters, along with three slowly moving commlink signals belonging to guards patrolling the grounds. Hey, wasn't this supposed to me just an elementary school? He decides to be cautious, and hack into one of the sensors, recording a 1-hour loop of "situation normal" so it can be played back while they infiltrate.

With the loop set up, it's a relatively simple matter for them to wait until the patrol is on the other side of the grounds, and climb the wall on the blind spot left by the hacked sensor. They manage to sneak across the grounds to the school's glass double doors, which are the only way in (going through a window would not be practical). There's a maglock on the door, which yields to Marcus' will as a faithful puppy as soon as his mind touches its dumb processor.

This was the first real live bona fide critical on the whole campaign. And a 3, no less, which is the best result possible and on 3d6 has about a 0.5% chance of coming up. I ruled Marcus would forever be able to command that particular lock as he saw fit, with no further rolls.

Their target is the receptionist's desktop terminal, which is linked into the school's network and has access to its student database. They turn it on, and Marcus tries to read its data as Cassius stands guard - looks like there are more guards inside the school, and they're a few minutes away from entering the reception. He manages it just in time, and the two intrepid infiltrators hightail it out of there before anyone is the wiser, locking the door behind them and restoring the sensor feed after they left its perimeter. Now they have access to Catherine's full schedule. There's still 2.5 days until delivery, so they decide to take it easy. The following day is spent researching Catherine's mother, Donna Westmore, whose name they got from her school file. Looks like she's an aeronautics engineer with Federated Boeing, is currently out of town, and maaaaybe has a few connections to the Yakuza here and there. Huh.

That same day, they arrive at the school when all the kids are going home, and they see, among all the normal parental vehicles, something that looks like a full convoy - three cars which arrive in line and wait ominously at the school gates until lil' Catherine exits the school and enters the middle one. A hard-looking dude with a gray crew-cut opens the door for her. Marcus manages to do his "homing signal" trick on the girl's commlink, which gives him a vague idea of the trajectory they use to go from Holm Elementary to her home (they already have her home address, which was obtained from the school files).

Time for some legwork. Who's that guy? Turns out he's a shadowrunner, going by the name of Frost, ex-military. Seems a bit down on his luck as of late, since his current job is bodyguarding a little girl, but he still has connections to his old runner team. They drop by her house later that night, a pre-fabricated two-story affair, and manage to catch the sounds of a very loud game of cards coming from the ground floor. Apparently Frost is having some friends over. Marcus detects no sensors around the perimeter, but they decide to err on the side of caution and hit her at the school, whose security they are more familiar with.

The adventure text said "poker", but I replaced that with truco just for the joke value. Truco is much more popular in Brazil than poker is, and games can get very, very loud, which explains why they were able to hear Frost and friends from outside the house. Poor Cathy must be having a hard time trying to sleep!

So a plan is hatched. They're going to actually kidnap the girl from her school, since Frost will probably pick random routes from her home to her school and back each time if he's any good. They're going to forge some ID, and infiltrate using that, probably as school employees, and wait until the kids are leaving their classrooms at the end of the day. They park their decrepit van nearby, and Marcus manages to grab the ID and cryptographic signature from a nearby unfortunate's commlink (employees, teachers and students are all required to keep their commlinks in active mode on school grounds. Too bad for them). The guy is a dwarf janitor, and the technomancer plans to use his ID as a template for a forged ID for Cassius. Unfortunately, his no good at forgery, managing to ruin several copies of the dwarf's ID before giving up. He's just found out he's no good at forgery, so it looks like they have a better chance of making it by loading the unmodified ID into Cassius' commlink and praying. They manage to score janitor's uniform from cheap store, and Cassius sneaks into the grounds wearing this disguise a few minutes before the last bell rings. To his surprise, it seems to work! None of the human and elven teachers look at the troll janitor long enough to notice he doesn't belong there, and all the automated ID checkers care about is the cryptographic signature, which matches. He finds a broom closet containing one of those carts with the really huge trash bins, and pushes it to a spot near Cathy's classroom. When the bell rings, the hallway is flooded with children.

Cassius sights his target, and calls out to her.

Cassius: Hey! Catherine! Principal's said he wanted to see ya!
Catherine: What? What for?
Cassius: Hell if I know. He said to take you there.

She's not buying it, however, and comes closer to take a better look at this new janitor's face. That's all the troll wanted, and he uses his hand-to-hand skills to grab the girl, stuff her into the bin, and quickly push the cart towards the exit. You can't really expect to do that and stay unnoticed for any length of time in such a crowded environment, though, especially when the bin in question starts shaking because of the struggling girl it contains. So it's no surprise that three security guards materialize on the still crowded hallway and, in typical Lone Star fashion, yell:

Lone Star: Freeze *BAM*BAM* motherfucker!

The bullets thankfully miss both the troll and any children. The overeager guard's companions are a little more hesitant about using lethal weapons in a school, which ends up giving Cassius the opportunity he needs to grab the bin and run like hell. Luckily, Marcus was already waiting with the van's engine hot, and they put some distance between them and the school before the guards have time to call for vehicular backup. They now need to cross into the UCAS, but thankfully Peaches, their coyote contact specializing on the CAS-UCAS border is available for an emergency crossing. She's friendly as usual, but when she hears they're transporting a hostage, she calls a halt to their march on the Aztec tunnels and goes over every inch of the van, the girl and the runners with a portable RFID tag detector. Finding nothing, she seems satisfied, but demands they leave the van with her for a while, so as not to compromise her tunnels.

Peaches: You better come pick it up within 24 hours or I'll dump it in a river.

Cassius wait near the tunnel exit, with a now properly gagged and bound little girl, while Marcus goes out to rent a car. With alternate transportation, they manage to get to the Aurora Warrens address without any noteworthy delays. They're received by a stern trio of metahumans, who, after an exchange of pre-arranged cryptographic signatures, take the girl off their hands.

Team Leader: Don't worry, we'll take good care of her. We're every bit as professional as you are.
Cassius' Player: And that's supposed to reassure us?

Anyway, the other team contacts Lady Jade to inform her they have an intact Catherine Westmore with them, and she in turn contacts our protagonists a while later to thank them for a job well done, and to leave a contact address by which they can reach her in the future. All's well that ends well, right?

Not exactly. Cassius and Marcus had been following the news since they ran from the school. On the same day as the kidnapping, a huge "Breaking News" report was aired speaking of a "daring raid" on a peaceful suburban school, where an armed troll burst into the place and made off with a little innocent girl, firing at the security guards present and endangering the lives of a hundred other little innocent children. Won't anyone think of the children? That was par for the course, really, but was enough to keep them interested, so they tuned in the next day to see how the report was progressing.

What they got was an even huger Breaking News Update on the Catherine Westmore situation, where tense hostage negotiations on an Aurora Warrens warehouse ended in tragedy as an unidentified sniper vaporized the girl's head as she was being transferred from the warehouse to the hands of Lone Star. The kidnappers were killed in the ensuing shootout, and the sniper's identity remained a mystery.

Well, shit.

The session ends with a tearful call from Lady Jade, who keeps repeating it was not supposed to end like that, vows to find the bastard behind it.

Lady Jade: I'll call you when I have a lead. I assume you'll want in on it.

And, with that cheerful note, we ended the session.

Me: Well, I'll let you guys chew on that for a while.
Cassius' Player: (laughing, relieved) You mean you'll let the original player chew on that! I'm out of here!

The original adventure waxes very melodramatic about Catherine's fate, but I didn't need to read it verbatim to get the expected reaction out of my players. Just describing the second news report in my best Fox News tone did it pretty well. There was also supposed to be a running gunfight between the runners in their car and Frost's buddies in a gorram helicopter gunship, but 1) I thought it was a little too over-the-top compared to the discreet actions of the runners so far, and 2) the excuse for the gunship appearing was that Catherine had a RFID locator implant, which I had already unwittingly written out of the story with Peaches' scan.

Another interesting tidbit is that the original school scene assumed the runners would be all sneaky and somehow try to pluck the girl out of her classroom, and the crowded hallway was supposed to be an extra complication for when Lone Star "inevitably" noticed them. In the actual game they waited for the bell to ring and ended up using the kids as a shield more or less intentionally.

Coming up next!

What has May been up to while her teammates were gone? Story 5: Sex, Lies, and Stink Bombs!