Bingo the dog shaman

Shadowrun game recap

Shadowrun game recap

We played last weekend, and had an exciting session.  Slider, the magician hired by Canoti to investigate the missile attack and the fire at Colson Towers, has been accepted as a member of the team, more or less.  He didn’t turn up an awful lot of answers for us yet, though.

We checked out the building at UW from which we needed to steal data on the Amulet of Suns.  We needed to penetrate a second-floor lab.

Kryptek was able to hack the UW system and tag us as permitted to been on the grounds.  Slider was to be a Wuxing magic researcher; Kryptek and I his research assistants; and Canoti and Agave his security detail. 

Early the next morning, I summoned an air spirit, and we drove to the lab building.  We entered with no real problem, and there was hardly anyone around.

Kryptek erased security footage as we passed through the halls, and we soon made it to the 2^nd floor and found the door to the lab.  This door was completely on another system; we did not have access to it, so Kryptek hacked it and got us in.  Just as we were entering, an older guy with unkempt hair approached us with a briefcase and said, “Oh thank goodness you are here!  Here’s this.” And he gave us the briefcase.  He was pretty frazzled and nervous.  We quickly found out that he was a professor.  To cut a long story short, he had something concealed in the briefcase, and we think it’s the stolen Amulet of the Suns, and he was told to expect us at that moment and give it to us.  How did he find us?  How did our Mr. Johnson know we would be there at that exact moment? How did the professor steal the amulet?  We don’t know, and are a little creeped out.

Within was a room with an actual mainframe crunching data, and lot of marker boards full of scribbles.  Kryptek decked in and found HUGE quantities of data, which filled all her available storage space and took a minute or so to download.  At the same time, some campus security cars pulled up out front, in non-emergency mode.  Right when Kryptek finished, she sent a false emergency signal from across campus, and the security cars started to roll away.

(At some point, during all this, one of us slapped the nervous professor with a tranq patch, knocking him out.)

Canoti watched the three campus security cars start down the street, but then saw the sudden appearance of several other black cars racing past them towards the building, causing the security vehicles to swerve out of the way.  They quickly stopped in front of the lab building we were in, and black-armored commandos hopped out.

Kryptek had the data, and we were fleeing the thaumaturgical lab when we saw two silhouetted commandos drop in front of the screened windows and plant an explosive device.  We were running down the hallway towards the stairs, with Agave carrying the prof firefighter-style, and Bingo carrying the mysterious suitcase, when the lab windows blew in.

Slider cast a trid phantasm spell [an type of illusion] in the second floor hallway:  he made it look like Canoti and Agave were there, taking cover in doorways, firing down the hall at our pursuers.  As we exited to the first floor, we could hear the sound of gunfire, both illusionary and real, above us.  Kryptek triggered the maglocks on the doors as we passed to slow down pursuit.

In the lobby we encountered two campus guards exchanging gun fire with the black-armored guys outside.  We acted like the innocent civilians we were disguised as, frightened and looking for protection, and the guards bought it, telling us to duck into the security room nearby.

Kryptek went back into the Matrix and soon found local network the assault team was using.  There was an large icon over the building: Some kind of large, silent black helicopter.  Kryptek, with great skill and effort and luck, was able to get some marks on the helicopter and attack it with data spikes.  She must have hit it pretty hard, because moments later, down on the first floor, we heard the sound of screeching turbines and some loud rooftop crashes.

Somewhere, up the stairwell we descended, we heard an explosion as another locked door was breached by the commandos. 

The enemy’s network stayed up, though.  Kryptek was disappointed to note that the enemy decker must not have been on the chopper.  She went hunting, found his deck, and killed it, too.

This left the enemy network open, and Kryptek quickly got marks on it.  As Bingo cast a stun bolt spell at the nearest commando in black armor, and the guards fired out the door, Slider cast another trid phantasm to make it look like we (and the two guards) were wearing the same type of commando gear as the enemy we were facing.  Kryptek immediately put fake AROs on their network for us to make us show up in Matrix as members of their team.  Slider—whom we all know by now to have exceptional social skills—told the guards to come with us.  We fled the building, with Slider announcing on the enemy’s communications network: “Leaving ground floor with wounded!”

We ran to our two vehicles and piled in and, as we did so, heard another voice on the network say, “…But, we’re not on the ground floor!”

The commandos realized they had been duped too late, and we were able to drive away into the surrounding busy streets and vanish.

We called our Mr. Johnson, who asked us if we had “both packages.”  So, apparently, he was expecting us to have the briefcase, too.  He gave us a location in the Redmond Barrens to meet him, and we were about to arrive there when we stopped the game for the night.

Questions:  Who was the commando team?  Our best guess is a rapid response team from The Atlantean Foundation, coming after the stuff we had just stolen from them, but there could be other players involved that we don’t know about.  How did our Johnson know we would be there at that exact time, and how did he arrange for the professor to meet us there with the stolen contents of the briefcase (and we’re assuming that the briefcase contains the Amulet of Suns, but the case is shielded and the professor seemed to be very nervous about us opening it, so we don’t know.)  What is the Amulet of Suns? Is it powerful?  Is giving it to our Johnson a mistake?  Will he kill us and use the amulet to conquer the world?  Can we get more money out of him before we hand it over? Who the hell knows?

Trolls and Twinkies

Two Shadowrun game nights - a recap.

Shadowrun recap of two separate game nights

Oct. 10, 2015 (Paul, Aaron, and I were the only ones able to make it to this game night.)

Well, a couple of days later we got a call from our fixer asking if we wanted to meet a potential employer at a nice café in Bellevue. Sure, we said.

Gumball the rigger picked up Bingo in a van, and we got to the café with Canoti.  Kryptek hacked into our commlinks and attended the meet virtually.  It was a busy lunch hour, and inside we found our Mr. Johnson.  He was a fashionably dressed Amerind.  After some discussion, we agreed to the terms:  he would pay our team 6500 nuyen each if we stole data from a traveling exhibit that had arrived at UW.

It appeared that this exhibit had something to do with ancient artifacts and display materials, but there was some sort of data associated with it that our Mr. Johnson wanted.  We had a week to get this done, he said.

Just as our Johnson got up to leave, we heard the squeal of tires out front.  Through the large plate glass window, we saw a van screech to a halt.  Two men with assault rifles hopped out and started firing up and down the street.  Canoti lept from his seat and made it to the front door, and Bingo was preparing to cast a spell, but before we could do anything else another figure popped up from the other side of the van and fired a missile launcher right into the restaurant window.

The resulting explosion blew the interior of the restaurant to bits.  Canoti, at the front door, was thrown out into the street, relatively unhurt.  Bingo the troll was knocked to the floor and injured, but not seriously.  But our rigger, Gumball, took the full force of the blast (a glitch was rolled; a point of Edge took that away, but it was still a bad deal—Gumball took a whopping 19 boxes of damage).

Bingo looked up to see our Mr. Johnson on his feet, unscathed—bit annoyed.  He simply said, “Now I’m angry,” and caused to van to explode into a fireball with a wave of his hand.  The three attackers were killed.  Then Mr. Johnson looked down at Bingo and said, “I expect to hear from you soon,” then disappeared.

The restaurant was scorched, partially on fire, and awash in blood and body parts.  He looked for Gumball and only found his arm.  Realizing they were in a badly compromised position (shadowrunners don’t fare well when they face police questioning at the scene of a big explosion in a nice part of town), Bingo and Canoti set out on foot to escape the area. (Bingo, regarding Gumball: “Well, there goes my ride home.”)

As we fled on foot, Kryptek – who was trying to piece together from us what happened—hacked into Gumball’s van and had it come after us to pick us up, which it did.  While this was occurring, we became aware of another event over local news feeds: the 34^th-36^th floors of Colton Towers (which we had infiltrated two nights before) were engulfed in flames, a spectacle that was a news story worldwide.  The cause was unknown.

Oct. 30, 2015

All players were present, though David and Karen were attending remotely.

The van was approaching a Knight Errant roadblock, but Kryptek was able to spoof a fake transponder for the van that made it appear as a cleared security vehicle.  It passed the KE officers as they were exiting their cars.

A bit later, though, the van’s sensors picked up a rotor drone following us.  Kryptek confirmed it had orders to make a positive ID on our van.  She was able to send it some fake instructions to return to wherever it came from, and we hastily left the area.

We got to Gumball’s well-to-do condo building, meeting Agave there.  Kryptek faked passcodes for us and handled the security cameras to hide our entry.  We got into, took a bunch of running gear, and left again.

That evening, Canoti hired an investigator (Paul’s new character, actually) to find out what the connection was between the rocket attack and the Colton Towers fire.  We don’t know if MCT was trying to kill us for revenge for the tower infiltration, or if the attackers were trying to kill our Mr. Johnson, or if the last run and this run are somehow connected, or whether the tower fire and the missile attack are unconnected (although the Seattle news is linking them both as terror attacks.)

Bingo is pretty upset.  Gumball was a good friend.  Just the previous night they had been at a nightclub together, and Gumball and he had discussed the possibility of Bingo setting up a medicine lodge at his condo.  Bingo is sad, and pretty ticked off.  Anyone who seems culpable in the bloody missile attack that killed Gumball (and at least 20 bystanders) will be a target for Bingo’s magical wrath.

Shadowrun recap, 9-5-2015

Recap

[In which our heroes hope that a music prank that was embarrassingly passé in 2015 is retro-hip now that it’s 2074]

After some discussion, we decided to attempt our infiltration of the office tower’s secret 34^th floor MCT research lab, using a pared-down team of shadow experts: Canoti, Kryptek, and Bingo (me).

Kryptek, using the info our team beat out of the captured decker, reconnoitered the first floor and found the secret elevator that had been installed by the former occupants, Shiawase Corporation.  He found it hidden in a maintenance closet, and also found it to be still operational.

Kryptek stole a van and used it to get us into the building parking garage.

 We made it to the elevator uneventfully, and ascended to the 34^th floor.  It was a small maglev elevator, and seemed to struggle a little with our weight, but quietly lifted us to our destination.  We found a wall panel and popped it out, finding ourselves in another utility room. Matrix-wise, this place was dead quiet, sealed off from the rest of the world.

Using our floor plans, we just hopped into the hallway and went to the security room. Kryptek quickly sprang the lock somehow; the door opened to reveal a single guard turning from a bank of monitors, some of which were showing us enter the room. Before he could react, Canoti knocked him out with a narcojet round.

We all went into the room.  We put the guard into a supply locker (which held a small arsenal, and which we raided) while Kryptek decked into the system.  She found our target room: a VR lab which also held the only other person on the 34^th floor.  This other person was a woman who was virtually operating some form of off-site fabrication equipment.  Also of note: Kryptek discovered that, indeed, the 33^rd and 35^th floors were MCT “zero-in, zero-out” kill zones, with 35 heavily armed guards on each floor. Yikes.

While Kryptek ran local matrix overwatch, Canoti and Bingo hurried to the VR lab and opened the door.  The woman turned and fired a laser pistol at us, barely missing. Bingo cast manabolt and Canoti used some hand weapon (I don’t know what) and knocked her out, but not before she was able to send a virtual command to her off-site machinery, causing it to go haywire and alerting MCT to a problem.

Kryptek fielded a call from corporate security and played for time, saying that no, “Agent White” was still working and there were no apparent problems.  After a moment, though, she stole the required data, uploaded the files we were required to upload, wiped the security recordings, and also inserted some old 1980s pop song by Someone-or-Other Springfield to give security something to listen to while we booked it.

With our pay data, as well as stolen weapons and gear, we made our quiet escape the same way we came in.  We stole another van in the parking garage and left the scene.

Our client paid us a little extra for providing a video still of “Agent White.”

Shadowrun session: Astral reconnaissance, then a firefight

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 34^th 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 34^th 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.

Shadowrun 3-21-2015

I played Shadowrun on Saturday. It was a small group (the GM plus three players) due to two absences.

Quotes of the night:

“Bring them down softly! Softly! SOFTLY!”  -- Gumball the rigger.

Spoken by Gumball in regard to three rotodrones that were attacking us.  He wanted us to take them intact so that he could use them himself.  However, in the first round of combat, Agave (our weapons specialist) hit one square on the nose with her grenade launcher, Bingo (my troll dog shaman) blew one up with a ball lightning spell, and Bingo’s force 6 air spirit crumpled the third into a tin foil ball using its “engulf” ability.

“I hop back on my Duracell and take off.” – Paul, playing Gumball the rigger.  We were using an AAA battery as a stand-in for his motorcycle among our table-top miniatures.

Shadowrun with brownies. Also, Blue Moon beer (not pictured)