All of our players were able to be present for a Shadowrun
session last Saturday (May 30). Such a rare treat for no one to be absent!
Our team was hired to infiltrate the 34th floor of a
60-storey office building in downtown Seattle, steal some computer data from a
closed system, and leave a message in its place.
On the face of it, the 34th floor belongs to an
insurance/law firm. However, our
employer clued us in that that’s just a cover:
It’s actually a secret remote computer lab for Mitsuhama Computer
Technologies.
We have 3 days to perpetrate the datasteal and deliver the
goods.
Initial scouting showed the building to be full of a mix of
companies, but our contacts tell us that a number of these are false fronts and
that other megacorporations are in the building. “Half the companies don’t even know the other
half are there,” she told us.
My troll shaman, Bingo, did some preliminary astral reconnaissance
and found the 34th floor to be sealed by an astral barrier.
We debated approaches, including various ideas about scaling
the windows between floors, getting access to stairwell doors, kidnapping
corporate drones and hacking their IDs, etc.
Bingo decided to go back for a closer look throughout the
building, astrally. He encountered
nothing until he drifted up to the base of the barrier through the elevator
shaft, when he was quickly jumped by a fire spirit. Spirits are fast, especially in astral space,
so before Bingo could really even react the spirit gave him a pretty hard
wallop [7 boxes of damage, which left Bingo with 4, and imposed a hefty -3
condition modifier]. Bingo was there
purely for scouting purposes and had no reason to fight, so blasted out of
there as fast as he could. The spirit
and its summoner, presumably a mage, gave chase, but Bingo shook them in the
chaos of downtown Seattle’s astral space and returned to his meat body, bruised
and bloody.
I shrugged off the possibility that the mage would try to
track him down. First of all, that
probably would not be a good use of corporate security resources under the
circumstances; if the wage mages went looking for everyone who bumped up
against their mana barriers, they’d be spending a lot of time sniffing
throughout the world for the low-grade astral jockeys and mana sneaks who poke
their snoots into other people’s business, and that is about 99.9% of astrally
active creatures. Magical dingdongs
running into that magical barrier has to happen fairly regulary—once a week, at
least, right? I mean, if you include
nosy spirits and whatnot. Probably many
of the corps in the building probe one another’s defenses from time to time.
Second of all, Bingo was hanging out at Agave’s apartment,
so if heat came down, at least he wasn’t at home. Heh.
Our team’s rigger, Gumball, got Bingo set up with a street
doc and the shaman was partially healed.
Bingo is now recuperating on a couch watching reruns of “The New New
Adventures of Lassie” on the trid.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team has followed up a lead about a very much
disliked computer decker who knows how to get into the building, and has done
it before. This decker has plenty of
enemies, one of whom told us where he’d be and encouraged us to beat the info
out of him. He’s at a bar in the
barrens, in an area known for strong anti-metahuman (and xenophobic)
sentiment. Since pretty much everyone on
our team is metahuman, a furriner, or both, it was agreed that mayhem and mass
violence was called for.
When we stopped for the night, everyone (except Bingo, who
was still trying to heal up in case he had to go up against that fire spirit
& mage again, but who actually feels really rotten about not being with his
pals) was initiating a firefight at the bar.
They started by shooting rotodrones that were hovering above the
building. Agave hit the front door with
a grenade, blowing in a window and destroying several motorcycles. [Karen,
playing Agave, got quote of the night after she threw the grenade: “No glitch!
I didn’t roll a glitch!”] One of the cars in front of the building opened a
pop-up turret with machine guns and ventilated the front of Gumball’s truck,
while Gumball’s steel lynx combat drone covered the back door of the bar.
That’s where we left off.
Now, speaking as a player, I spent some time wondering how
powerful was the spirit that assaulted Bingo.
I am guessing Force 6, but maybe higher; could be 7 or 8. If it was lower than 6, it must have rolled
pretty well, but I guess it could have been Force 5. The message I got was that the 34th
floor was a very dangerous place to poke around.
Also, open assault on the bar from the outside sounds like
tons of fun (another reason for Bingo to be sad about his choice to sit on the
couch), but seems like it has some strategic holes. Things could turn out pretty bad; I can see
other members of the team easily getting sidelined with extra bodily
holes. At the very least, those 5 boxes
of damage already taken by Gumball’s truck will also be poking holes in our
profit margin.
It will probably be at least 6 weeks before we can play
again.
