A couple of nights ago we broke out Shadowrun again. It was the follow up to the previous write up I did and in this one I did a bit more preparation. I opened up Hero Lab and created a few NPC’s, two of which were going to have to be used by the players of last week as their characters have gone missing for this game. I did not want to have them hang around and wait for themselves to be rescued (if they are still alive that is) and it is lucky I didn’t as they are not quite at the point where they can find that out.
Although I am holidays from teaching I have not had a huge amount of time to be rereading Shadowrun so I am expanding things a bit at a time in game so I can learn it bit by bit. This week I made a magician NPC (he is kind of key in finding the others) and he was a spell caster/summoner which caused me to go over those rules again. I also wanted to make sure there was a bit of social interaction so I was going to make sure that where the players led me I would put some social interaction in their way.
The game went well. I think everyone enjoyed it. The full crew made it to the game too! The two players that started up last night were close companions of one of the missing characters and had worked with the other before. On hearing of the tragedy they began investigations and put their contacts under the pump finding out some sinister material, largest of all being that Saedur Krupp had called in the aerospace shuttle missing prior to the scheduled check in that proved it to be so. They decided that they needed a magician to try and track down their companions and so one called his fixer, Snake, up and had a meet.
Snake is a Fixer I used in the 1990’s for my players, but he was just that, a snake. Most of the time the runners were beating on Snake after they found out they double crossed him. In this iteration he is an eighty year old nervous wreck of a man with only a few runners now working with him. He got the rep around town that he could not control his hired help and lost a lot of street cred. The game was going to show that this had tie ins back to my original games (which only one player on the team had played with me in those) and so when Snake had his head blown off in the meet by a new upstart Fixer and her muscle the players thought very little of it apart from the one that played with me before. He loved the touch, and the fact that Snake eventually got what he had coming to him.
The new Fixer is Fat Charlie the Arc Angel, an NPC I have been dying to bring in for three years of gaming. She is a little under 5 foot tall, a human, dark skinned and not fat by any stretch of the imagination. She came prepared and had done some research of her own to get the players interested in joining in with her. The two players with missing characters got to play two of the characters that were travelling with her. The recently hired mage and a “sort of” street samurai.
The players discovered from her the following details;
- The shuttle that went missing was actually decommissioned a week prior to the flight and bought into service rapidly for some reason that had little justification.
- A project being run by Saedur Krupp was postponed a week prior to this and enacted on the night of the flight
- Saedur Krupp had, as part of this secret project, bought an island on the outskirts of the Bermuda Triangle, money had seriously flowed into the setup of the clandestine island several months prior to this.
As a show of faith Fat Charlie had tracked down the mage who worked in accident investigations finding parts of aerospace vehicles for investigation. She also was to provide her bodyguard and a jet to fly them to the Bermuda area and search for the downed plane. The choice was a good one and as they arrived and headed out they pinpointed a small island that matched what they were expecting. They flew to nearby Grenada and stayed the night.
Overnight they charmed the locals and worked a deal that would have them on a charter boat the next day to the island. The group made sure to keep the small town in the good graces hurling a large portion of cash over the bar and joining in the fun. The next morning they woke Slim Jim (a 7′ 4″ massive local they mistook for a troll) and got his boat, the Ruby underway.
4 hours later they got to the island and waved Slim Jim away. There were two VTOL pads, both occupied near a shed on the far side of the island. All they had to do was deal with the obviously well trained security that were roaming the forested island. Moving to the high point of the island they found bits of the wreckage and corpses that had been left to rot in the sun. Investigating these they realised that all of the corpses here were in fact uninjured when they were killed. They all had bullet holes in their skull and appeared to have been shot where they were laying, almost as if they had been asleep.
Getting to the top of the hill they tried to locate the next patrol. Unfortunately for them the patrol had spotted them and were very good as they approached with their sneak checks. They attempted an ambush of their own but as the players were on alert they actually beat their surprise rolls. A tense skirmish, and unfortunately a loud skirmish broke out and the combat ran well. Nice and swift and fun to run. We actually used some of the broader rules in combat (one of the players went full defense and it saved his life) which made it a learning experience for us all.
At the end of the combat we did some healing and left it for the night as they looked down at the building that likely contains their friends. Dead or alive they are not certain but it is the next place they are moving to, even though some of the group is a little bit injured now. Next week will tell us how they fare. Keep rolling!