Status Update - Happy New Year!

This is sort of a clearing house posting of things I'm doing.

Dungeon23

I've started a Dungeon23 project.  If you have not heard about it, it is a writing project where you design and writeup a dungeon room a day for all of 2023, ending the year with a mega-dungeon.  There are ways to organize the material, but no hard and fast rules.  The most common is to make each month a different dungeon level (or dungeon).  Weeks can either be a cluster of 7 rooms on that level or follow a weekly theme.  

For the first week, I'm doing a theme of Entrances.  Each day I'm designing a room that is an entrance to the dungeon.  I'm not assigning a particular dungeon level to them at this time, just designing the room.  It is important for a good dungeon to have several access points, both on the starting level and to access deeper levels in ways other than starting at the top and walking down.

I'll post more about this project as time goes on.  Right now it is day 2 and I have two entries written.

Ratpack on the Shattered Star Adventure Path

Session 10 for Book 3 will post tomorrow morning (January 3).  I am committing to posting at least one write-up per week.  We will be playing Session 19 this evening, so I have plenty of material, but I'd like to catch up so I'm only a couple sessions behind in the write-ups.  That said, see the next entry.

The June Project

In June, one of the players in my Monday group will have their first child, which is awesome!  The Other GM is the dad, so the two of them will be super busy with the birth in June and the newborn's lack of sleeping habits in July and August (at the least).

To free up time for them, our group will switch campaigns and I will resume running a game.  At this point it looks like it will be a Shadowrun game using the 5th edition of the rules (the current rules are 6th edition).  All the players have the 5th edition rules and I don't see a need to switch editions here.  The interesting thing for this campaign will be Seattle deciding that Knight Errant is not up to the task of handling crime in the city any more and Lone Star is no better, so they put out a Request to Bid to the other megacorporations for a law enforcement solution.

Aztechnology wins the bid.

That's it for right now.  A major thunderstorm is rolling through, so I need to save and post this while I can.  Look for Session 10 posting tomorrow and more to follow.

Later!

Shadowrun Archive

This page is an archive, preserving links to the runs/adventures my Monday Night Group played through as well as some cheat sheets I put together to clarify the rules for us.  The links below go to the first session report for each run.  There will be links to the following session notes for each run. I may need to go back in and retroactively add a link at the end of each run, but for now this page should suffice.  Please leave comments on this page.  Thank you.

The Pleiades Group
Mak Attack - The first run of the newly formed Pleiades Group, an association of seven shadowrunners that became a solid and successful team.

News - Background information, not an actual run.

The Pickup - An extraction in support of another team.  Run by me.

The Third Run - The Other GM ran this, so my name for it might be a little too on point.

Monkey Business - Concept borrowed from a Cyberpunk game run by Eric Heisserer.  Run by me.

A Dwarf in Need - Or "How to get paid three times for the same job."  Run by the Other GM.

Everybody Needs Somebody - A series of small runs dealing with the mess caused by another group's failed run.  Run by me.

Clean-up on Aisle Sin - Dealing with consequences of that clean-up.  Run by the Other GM.

Implants - Corporate hostilities start stepping up.  Run by me.

St. Valentines Day Monkey Burger Massacre and Barbeque - The second Monkey Burger run.   Run by me.

Valkyrie Ride - Corporate fallout from Everybody Needs Somebody.  Run by me.

Sam's Run - The first player-sponsored run and a follow-up to A Dwarf in Need.  Introduces our secondary characters.  Run by the Other GM.

Urban Surfin' - Grabbing an Ares prototype weapon in transit.  Run by the Other GM.

Woodchipper - A series of small jobs being spit out all over the Pleiades Group.  Run by me.

Under the Mountain - The group's most ambitions run.  Run by the Other GM.

Butcher's Bill - Doing a favor for the Vory to avoid a mob war.  Run by the Other GM.

Operation Parrot T-Rex - The group's first international run.  Run by one of the players sitting in as a GM.


We ended the campaign here on a high note.  I was beginning to burn out due to Real Life issues - getting laid off twice in two years will do that.  While Real Life got better, we have not returned to the Shadowrun system so far.  Still, what started out as an side game blossomed out into a fun campaign we all enjoyed.

Cheat Sheets

As we played, I had to put together some cheat sheets to get the rules systems straight as the 5th Edition Shadowrun rules were written for conciseness, not clarity.

Initiative Sequence

Physical Combat Sequence

Vehicle Chase Combat Sequence

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Session 10

[This session happened September 18th, 2017, and was run by New GM.  See the end notes from last session for an details as to why the gap between sessions was so large.  A major portion of the delay was Hurricane Harvey, which New GM decided to incorporate as a story element.  Read on…]

PCs
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm
Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it
Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)
Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily
Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth

NPC’d
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant
Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin


July 6, 2076
3:00 AM
It is raining across the city.

Void woke up the team, recently gone to sleep after securing the 15 biosamples required for the run, informing them that Typhoon 42 would unexpectedly make landfall sometime around 8:00 AM.  The group discussed what to do and decided to make use of the opportunity.

The extraction plan, which was predicated on taking the targets out as part of a fire rescue, was quickly modified to be a typhoon evacuation.  Dai was called and told the group needed a vehicle able to seat 5 people and 8 dogs and they needed it in one hour.  Dai, currently at a bar with a number of attractive women, was less than thrilled to suddenly be on the job.  When Dai asked if he’d be done after delivering the vehicle, he was told “no,” he would be needed to front a con to get onto the New Dawn Technologies campus and then a plane ride to Europe.  THEN he’d be done.

The team spent the next hour packing up and sanitizing the corporate apartment removing all traces of their presence.  Everything not needed for this extraction was loaded up into Sin’s GMC Bulldog to be taken to the hyperjet at the airport.  [The pilot and flight crew were also woken up and told to file a flight plan leaving no later than 6:30 AM.  This took some doing.]

4:00 AM
Dai arrived with a black Ford Econovan, reasonably sober, and complaining.  The complaining tapered off once the job was explained and the fee he was going to be paid enumerated [mostly it was the fee that quieted him down].  The apartment was done being cleaned and smelled of bleach.  Sin, Bookie, and Killroy got into Sin’s GMC Bulldog and headed to the airport to start moving things over into the jet.

4:50 AM
Dr. Valdi was called and told to expect two contradictory emails.  The extraction was about to start.

5:00 AM
Winds are starting to pick up, but are not dangerous yet.  The outer bands of the typhoon are moving across the area.

Using the remote access point connected directly to the New Dawn Technologies servers as a back door, Bookie sent out several VERY official looking email to Doctors Valdi and O’Seahnasaigh and to the gate guards on duty.  The first email appeared to be addressed to all New Dawn Technologies employees, instructing them to shelter in place while the typhoon moved through the area.  The second email was sent only to Doctors Valdi and O’Seahnasaigh and stated that certain critical personnel were being evacuated and recipients of this email were on that list.  It instructed recipients to not share this information with anyone else upon penalty of termination.  The third email was sent to the gate guards to expect some unusual traffic escorting VIPs to other locations.  It provided a [false] list of license plates and IDs for the drivers and their teams.

Bookie, riding herd on New Dawn Technologies’ email system, intercepted two emails from Dr. O’Seahnasaigh.  The first email was Dr. O’Seahnasaigh attempting to verify the orders.  Bookie provided a response designed to allay Dr. O’Seahnasaigh suspicions [message content provided by Dai in the form of the other players] and continue with the charade that she should quietly prepare to be part of an executive evacuation, a team will be there for her just before 6:00 AM.  The second email was to Dr. Valdi, asking him to come over and help crate up the dogs.

5:30 AM
Prometheus signals he is in a sniper position on top of a building just outside the New Dawn Technologies campus.  The rain was causing some issues with visibility, but he was ready to provide overwatch for the extraction team.  He had clear lines of fire on the nearest gatehouse and the parking area of the campus residences.

5:45 AM
The “evacuation” team arrives at the nearest gate.  The guards, not happy about being stuck on gate duty while the typhoon comes in are cranky but efficient.  They verified the license plate on the Ford Econovan is on their list as are the IDs of the driver and the two assistants with him before letting them through and going back inside where it is dry.  Dai drove the van over to the residences and parked near Dr. O’Seahnasaigh’s apartment.  Void and Baelthor, dressed as non-descript corporate security, piled out and knocked on the Dr. O’Seahnasaigh’s door.

Void played the part, verifying Dr. O’Seahnasaigh’s identity before directing Baelthor to assist Dr. O’Seahnasaigh with the three carriers loaded with fire-breathing dachshunds.  Void then went to go gather Dr. Valdi, pretending to be surprised he was already present.  Void and Baelthor got the two doctors loaded into the Econovan.

6:00 AM
Dai pulled away, heading back to the gate.  He honked at the guards who waved him through and turned left to get to the Cara’Sir airport.  Just after leaving the campus gate, Dai received a report from Prometheus that three motorcycles with two riders each were rapidly approaching and the passengers appeared to have weapons at the ready.

“Bollocks,” Dai replied.

End of Session

[Quick thinking and a rapid response to the changing circumstances allowed our team to grab the targets virtually unopposed by the competing teams, but one of them caught on quick enough to send a pursuit team.]

[So I missed the next two sessions due to a need to put together a book proposal and get it submitted on time.  As a result, I have no notes for what exactly happened.  Based on my memory from what I was told, the fight with the motorcyclists took both sessions as New GM was not very familiar with the car chase and combat rules.  I’ve asked some of the other players if they have notes and they are checking.  If they do, I’ll write the session notes from their notes and prodding their memories.]

[So that plus long hours at work and a birthday celebration this weekend (I’m turning a significant age and my wife is throwing a big celebration at the house with most of my local friends) mean I will not have time to write a Shadowrun blog post for June 7th, so I’m not going to kill myself trying.  I have the 8th off, so I’m going to write material that weekend to post the following week, so expect to see a combined report for Sessions 11 and 12 to appear on the 14th.  If I cannot get any notes, I’ll do a summation and tack it in front of the write-up for Session 13, which I have full notes for.]

[NOTE: Hurricanes start raining much earlier than depicted here and the winds are probably more dangerous by this point.  I think landfall was supposed to be around 10:00 AM, so the plane taking off should have been more iffy.  Getting permission from the airport should have been very iffy, especially as they were likely not open for the day.  That said, it kick-started the run and provided some good drama.]


Session 1
Sessions 2 and 3
Session 4
Sessions 5 and 6
Session 7
Session 8
Session 9
Hurricane Harvey!

Session 11 (not yet written)
Session 12 (not yet written)
Session 13 (not yet written)
Session 14 (not yet written)

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Session 9

[This session happened August 7th, 2017, and was run by New GM.  The scheduling conflicts for different people continued, hence the two week delay between sessions.  Other than that, it was a great session wherein we achieved…well, I’ll let you read it and see.]

PCs
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth
Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily
Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)
Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it
Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm

NPC’d
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant
Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin


July 5, 2076
Morning
Having spotted the magical support for the competing teams, the Pleiades Group suddenly felt time pressure to complete the job.  Bookie spent some time doing research on the wage mages working for New Dawn Technologies.  He was able to identify the two mages on the payroll and some background on them.  They appeared to be well paid by New Dawn Technologies and lived in a corporate compound on the other side of Cara’Sir.  A very secure compound.  This suggested that bribing them or otherwise removing them from the picture would be unlikely to succeed and might alert security something was going on.

In the meantime, Killroy spent seven hours assembling the thermal bombs for the job.  This effort resulted in four thermal bombs that would fit within the server units and have enough power to destroy the servers and still set the building on fire.

9:00 PM
With the sun starting to set, the group moved their supplies for the run from the apartment into Sin’s GMC Bulldog.  Bookie ran on the New Dawn Technologies security systems and programmed the sweep camera facing the street on Building 55 to slowly shorten its sweep so that by 9:30 PM there was a gap in the video coverage allowing unobserved access to the corner of the building.

9:30 PM
The GMC Bulldog arrived and Sin parked it exactly within the newly created blind spot in the perimeter video surveillance.  Prometheus stepped out of the Bulldog and fired his grappling gun, neatly dropping a grapple line on the corner of Building 55.  He pulled it tight and tied it off on the Bulldog before signaling to the infiltration team to exit the vehicle.

The infiltration team (Void, Killroy, Baelthor, and Wren), currently invisible thanks to Baelthor [who took STUN from the Drain casting improved invisibility on himself, Void, and Killroy] and Wren [who handled his own improved invisibility], exited the vehicle.  Void ran up the line [literally] to the roof of Building 55 while Killroy, Baelthor, and Wren used climbing grips to work their way up the line.  Once all four were on the roof, they signaled Prometheus via microtransceiver and he applied a catalyst stick to the stealth rope, quickly dissolving it.  Killroy picked up the actual grappling hook and put it in his satchel to return to Prometheus later.

The infiltration team then made their way across the rooves toward their target.  There was a three meter gap they had to jump across to get to Building 36.  Void made the leap easily, but Wren needed to be “assisted” [thrown] across the gap by Killroy.  Baelthor and Killroy made the leap with little difficulty.

To get from Building C to Building B they had to rappel down two floors using more stealth rope.  Once on the roof of Building B, they applied a catalyst stick to this line – their path back would be inside the buildings.  They then ran the length of Building B to Building A, staying in the shadows as much as possible, where the roof access hatch they wished to use was located.

Void quickly picked the lock on the hatch, defeating the alarm system on it with ease.  To bypass the mana barrier on the access hatch, Baelthor dropped the improved invisibility on Killroy [who would have no luck pressing through the barrier without losing the spell or triggering an alert].  Baelthor and Wren both safely pressed through the ward in one go without disrupting it.  It took Void two tries [she tied on the first roll].

The infiltration team made their way down the stairwell, Bookie looping the cameras just ahead of them on each landing.  To access the kennel area and the two server rooms, they needed to move through the central corridor for this floor, which is where a basilisk was slowly patrolling.  In fact, the basilisk in this hallway was right at the door to the stairwell when they peeked in.  Luckily it did not see them peeking.  They waited a minute while it lumbered down the hallway away from the door.  Once they felt it was far enough away, they quietly opened the stairwell door and darted over to the door to the kennel area.  Void quickly bypassed the lock and all four runners piled into the kennel, closing the door behind them.  The click of the stairwell doorway closing made the basilisk pause and look, but not seeing anything edible it did not turn back.

Baelthor immediately started locating the correct cages from the client-supplied list and took samples from the research creatures within them.  [The client supplied training in this back in Seattle, which Void and Baelthor took as the two most likely to be on this part of the job.]  Killroy suggested that Void and Wren sneak over to the server rooms now while Baelthor was taking the biosamples.  Void concurred and she and Wren checked the hallway to see where the basilisk was now.

[New GM made a roll on Void’s current Edge to see how lucky she was and rolled a good number of successes.]  The basilisk was down at the far end of the hallway, scrabbling at the door that separated this hallway section from the next one.  The basilisk was apparently aware of the basilisk on the other side of that door and distracted by it.  Void and Wren took advantage of the moment and snuck to the doorway for the first server room [it was just the other side of the stairwell door].  It took Void nine whole seconds to bypass the lock, which seemed much longer while they were in a hallway with a basilisk and no cover.

Once safely on the other side of the door, Void and Wren set to the various tasks they needed to accomplish.  Wren found an obscured access port on a server unit, plugged in the remote access point Bookie had provided, and activated the device, tucking it under a wiring bundle.  This would provide Bookie with a backdoor into the server to run Nuke from Orbit through at the end of the next phase of the job.  Void meanwhile quickly planted two of the incendiary bombs inside two other server units and then opened the fire suppression system.  She rewired some of the internal circuits of the suppression system so that the system would appear active, but was actually deactivated, and then closed it up.  She and Wren then carefully snuck through the hallway to the next server room and repeated the process, this time with Wren planting the bombs while Void disabled the fire suppression system here.

This part complete, Void contacted Killroy over her microtransceiver to report they were done and to find out if the biosamples collection was complete.  Killroy reported Baelthor was just finishing.  Void could hear the basilisk plodding down the hallway and relayed that information to Killroy.  Killroy updated her and Wren when the basilisk could be heard at the door to the kennels.  He further advised that Baelthor was done getting the samples here and they were ready to leave.  When Void heard the basilisk plod past the door to the server room she and Wren were in, she relayed that to Killroy, counted to 15, and then she and Wren exited the server room, moving as quietly as possible to the stairwell door.  At the same time, Killroy opened the door to the kennels and he and Baelthor stepped over to the stairwell door.  Baelthor quietly opened the stairwell door and all four runners piled into the stairwell, letting the door close behind them.

[At this point in the evening it was getting late, so we started speeding things up in order to wrap up for the evening.  A side effect of this is that the last part of the run was more of a summary punctuated by a few dice rolls.  On the other hand, our plan was working and as long as we didn’t screw up, the rest should have been the smooth ride it was.]

After their heart rates had reduced a little, the group climbed the stairs to the third floor and started making their way across to Building C.  They then made their way across two large open office areas in Building B to the cross-building access to Building C.  In Building C they located the stairwell closest to the aviary on the first floor and descended to the first floor.  There they had to wait for yet another basilisk to go by before accessing the aviary.

Inside the aviary, Baelthor and Void split up the list and started collecting samples while Killroy and Wren kept an eye on things.  One of the biosamples Void had to collect was from a bird the size of an ostrich with sharp talons.

Once the biosamples were collected, the group exited the aviary and made their way to the roof of Building C.  This access hatch had a fire trap on it, which needed to be carefully bypassed without triggering it, in addition to the ward, THEN the lock had to be defeated and the alarm disabled.  Void made it look easy despite some sweating on her part [she’d been literally burned by hellhounds before and so fire traps made her nervous].

Eventually the team returned to the roof of Building 55 and signaled to Prometheus.  Prometheus stepped out of the GMC Bulldog again and fired his grapple gun at the corner of Building 55, neatly dropping the line on the corner.  Killroy tied the line off on a convenient A/C unit and then cut the grapple free, placing it in his satchel next to the first one.  Prometheus tied off his end and signaled the line was ready to be used.  The infiltration team pulled out zipline hooks and rode the zipline down to the ground outside the boundary of the New Dawn campus.  When all four were down and inside the Bulldog, Prometheus applied his catalyst stick to the stealth line, eliminating the evidence, and then climbed back inside the Bulldog.  Sin then drove the Bulldog away, taking time to verify they were not being tailed before heading to the safe house.

Bookie programmed the sweep camera on the street side of Building 55 to slowly go back to normal, eliminating the gap in the video surveillance.

End of Session

[This session started to run a bit long, as I mentioned, so we wrapped it up a little quicker than normal.  We wanted to finish this part of the run to avoid having it stretch across to game sessions.  This turned out to be a fortuitous decision as two things happened that pushed the next session all the way back to September.]

[The first thing that happened was I went into the hospital the next night with atrial fibrillation.  This means my two atria (the smaller chambers on top of the heart) were not in synch with the rest of my heart and were busy doing their own thing.  My ventricles were, as a result, double- to triple-timing it to try and keep my blood circulating.  This is a disconcerting sensation, to say the least.  Long-story-short, I spent the next three days in the hospital and went home with a set of prescriptions for my heart and to bring my high blood pressure under control (it mostly is now).  We skipped the next game session so I could recover some more and the one after that due to scheduling issues.]

[The week after that, Hurricane Harvey (slowly) rolled into Texas and dropped enough rain to push the Earth’s crust down 2 cm over an area roughly the size of New Jersey (33,000,000,000,000 gallons of rain for those curious).  I’ve lived in the Houston area for decades and have never seen that much rain and I’ve experienced the phenomena I call “The Week That It Rained” several times.  Luckily only one family I know personally had to be evacuated, but neighborhoods around mine took extensive flooding damage, including complete submersion of the ground floor of many houses.  Even now there are businesses that have not fully recovered or closed permanently.]

[Perhaps not surprisingly, New GM incorporated this event into the next session.  See you next report when Typhoon 42 unexpectedly rolls into Tir Tairngire and throws a wrench into everyone’s timing!]


Session 1
Sessions 2 and 3
Session 4
Sessions 5 and 6
Session 7
Session 8

Hurricane Harvey!

Session 10 (not yet written)
Session 11 (not yet written)
Session 12 (not yet written)
Session 13 (not yet written)
Session 14 (not yet written)

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Session 8

[This session happened July 24th, 2017, and was run by New GM.  The gap between this session and the last one was due to scheduling conflicts for different people.  My notes are kind of sketchy because Prometheus wasn’t directly involved, so this write-up is a bit thin.]

PCs

Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth

Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)

Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily

Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it

Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why

Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm

NPC’d

Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser

The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant

Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin

July 4, 2076

With a solid physical plan, at least for grabbing the biosamples and prepping for the datarun/firebombing portion, the group decided that some magical scouting was in order.  Baelthor and Wren Astrally projected over to the New Horizons Technologies campus and started reviewing the magical defenses.

They discovered that the roof access hatches on Buildings A and C had wards on them.  The access hatch on Building A had a simple Alarm ward on it, but the access hatch on Building C had an Alarm ward AND a Fire Trap.  As the infiltration team will have improved invisibility on them when entering the building, foreknowledge of the wards was going to be vital.  Avoiding the fire trap was also going to be important, but not as much as NOT alerting the mages on security detail at the campus.

While scouting, Baelthor and Wren also noticed three other mages scouting the area.  One was an elf shaman, who assensed lower in power that either Baelthor or Wren.  [As both of them had a Magic Rating of 7, this was not necessarily saying much, but the estimate was that the elf shaman had a Magic Rating of 5.]  The other two were a pair of elves, possibly twins, working in tandem.  The pair of elves assensed as one of equal power and one of higher power!  As all three of the elves were being cautious and stealthy, it was highly likely they were from the competing teams and the first sign of their involvement.

Suddenly, the clock was ticking!

Once Baelthor and Wren reported back their observations, the team started brainstorming ways to bypass the magical security.  One option discussed was going after the security mages.  Possibilities ranged from bribery to not report intrusions to hitting them with vomit gas so they think they’re sick to knocking them out with NeuroStun.  Killing them would be counter-productive as it would put security on high alert and make grabbing the targets much more difficult.  We needed more information on the mages, so was asked Bookie to gather intel on them from the Matrix.  Depending on what he found out, we could start the biosamples grab as early as the next night.

End of Sessions

[This session took longer to roleplay than it took to read or write the session notes, and that’s my fault.  I’ll be honest here: the magic aspects of Shadowrun are my least favorite parts, so I tend to tune out when the magic-heavy characters are doing their thing.  I learned enough so I could run the game as a GM, but the runs I put together are magic light compared to those run by the Other GM or New GM.  When I’m playing, I focus on the hardware and planning aspects, trusting the magic-heavy characters to know their stuff and let me know where the boundaries are.  So far, that’s worked.]

[You might notice in the links below that Hurricane Harvey is listed.  There won’t be separate entry for Harvey, but it will effect the course of the run and cause a noticeable gap between sessions.  I’ll talk about it more later and link to the posting I did at the time it happened.]

Session 1

Sessions 2 and 3

Session 4

Sessions 5 and 6

Session 7

Session 9 (not yet written)

Hurricane Harvey!

Session 10 (not yet written)

Session 11 (not yet written)

Session 12 (not yet written)

Session 13 (not yet written)

Session 14 (not yet written)

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Session 7

[This session happened July 2^nd, 2017, and was run by New GM.  This was mostly deciding upon our plan, which in Shadowrun is possibly one of the more critical points in a storyline.  This is the top of that first big hill in a rollercoaster - after this, things start happening quickly and there is no getting off the ride until it’s over.]

PCs

Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth

Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily

Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)

Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it

Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why

Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm

NPC’d

Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser

The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant

Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin

July 3, 2076

Afternoon

After reviewing the two days of video of the New Dawn Technologies campus, the team made some decisions.  This job was going to have two major parts: Part A to get all the biosamples and setup the destruction of the lab and data, Part B to grab all the targets and trigger the destruction of the lab and data.  These two parts would happen on separate days.  This would keep the number of tasks the group needed to achieve at one time down to a manageable level.  It was confirmed that the paragoose (Bonus Job #2) was going to be too much a pain to pull off and too dangerous to have in the hyperjet afterwards, so it would still be ignored.  [This was the team giving up on 70,000¥, which says a lot about how far the team has come.  Their first job together as a team only paid 12,000¥ and that was only 8 months ago in game.]

While discussing how to eliminate the data files and backups, Bookie stated he had access to a program called Nuke-from-Orbit that obliterates targeted files and make Matrix recovery impossible.  That said, he would need to get the latest updates for it before use.  The team agreed this is how they will eliminate the online files, but Bookie, as Dr. Reynold, will need to meet with Dr. Valdi and find out if New Dawn Technologies keeps backups anywhere.  Bookie placed a call and arranged a meeting for drinks that evening.

Looking over the AR model of the campus the group [and by group, I mean Bookie] had assembled, it was clear that a roof-top entrance would be best.  The animals they needed to sample from were in two different labs in two different, but connected, buildings.  One of the buildings on campus came relatively close to a side street [Building 55 for later reference].  From that building it would be possible to run along the rooves to the target buildings with only one three-meter gap between two buildings to jump across.  Easy.  [This gap is between Building 36 and Building C.]  Bookie would need to adjust the sweep pattern of only one roof camera so the team could climb a line from outside the perimeter to the roof of the first building.

Once in the target building [designated Building A], the group would be able to move around between the buildings [through Building B to Building C] they needed via third floor skywalk.  The interior maps provided by Dr. Valdi showed a roof access hatch at the top of a stairwell that was pleasantly close to each of the first-floor labs they needed access to.  They would have to slip through a hallway patrolled by a basilisk in each case, but it looked do-able.

The interior maps also showed the server room for the building.  This offered several possibilities, which were discussed.  The group settled on inserting a remote access point here to give Bookie direct access to the servers.  The group also decided that these servers would be the highest probability place for back-ups, so the team would plant incendiary charges inside the servers and in the ceiling here, wired for remote detonation.  The chaos of a building fire would provide cover for the teams exit after Part B.

The plan for Part B of the job was a little more nebulous.  The residences on campus were across a large, open field from the target labs.  There was a kennel run for dogs and a picnic area on the far side of the residences, which put them relatively close to the perimeter, but with an intervening berm blocking line of sight [not to mention two layers of surveilled fences, the inner one electrified].  If Dr. Valdi could talk Dr. O’Seahnasaigh into a picnic with all the hell dachshunds in one place with “Dr. Reynold”, who would actually be Baelthor with some NeuroStun, he could trigger the NeuroStun to knock them all out [Baelthor, being immune to NeuroStun, would not succumb], allowing for easy pick up.  Then the data and servers would be taken out and the team would infiltrate the campus as part of the fire rescue.  This was pretty iffy, but the best the team had for the moment.

After this, the team discussed possible options for the delivery part of the job in the Czech Republic.  For the amount of pay the job was worth, the Pleiades Group could hire some local shadowrunner teams to act as decoys and still turn a nice profit.  Three to four teams with orders to shoot anyone following them would provide plenty of cover for the actual delivery.  Sin and Prometheus poured over the maps of the Czech Republic and plotted an indirect route that was would not add on too many hours to the trip.  There was no hurry on implementing this as they needed to concentrate on actually getting the target and packages first.

Evening

Bookie met with Dr. Valdi and discussed the data files.  There were backups in the server room, on an isolated, hardened server.  Also, Dr. Valdi agreed he could get Dr. O’Seahnasaigh and the hell dachshunds out for a picnic on either the 11^th or 12^th to meet Dr. Reynold in a social environment.  Bookie asked him to do so.

When Bookie returned to the Windsong Corporate Apartments, he relayed everything he learned from Dr. Valdi and that Dr. Valdi would arrange a picnic lunch on either the 11^th or 12^th.  This let the team finalize the plans for Part A and firm up the plans for Part B.

The plan for Part A now looked like this:

1. Bookie resets the scan length of the camera on Building 55 so there is a gap on the western corner out to the street.
2. The team will drive up on the side street and park in this gap.
3. Prometheus will use his grapple gun to fire a line of stealth rope to the western corner of Building 55’s roof and secure it.
4. Void will run up the line while Killroy, Wren, and Baelthor use climbing grips to climb up the line inside a Silence bubble.  Once everyone is up, Prometheus will apply a catalyst stick to the line and eliminate it.  Killroy will grab the grapple to return to Prometheus later and not leave evidence.
5. The infiltration team will then move from Building 55 to Building 36, jump across the gap to Building C, move across Building C, rappel down to the roof of Building B, and run the length of Building B to Building A.
6. The infiltration team will enter Building A through the roof access hatch and take the stairs down to the first floor.  There they will split up: Void and Baelthor to get the biosamples, Killroy and Wren to access the server room and plant the incendiary devices and access point.
7. After completing their goals, both teams would meet back up on the third floor and make their way to Building C through Building B, avoiding any interior security [little to none was expected].
8. In building C, Void and Baelthor would collect the rest of the biosamples.
9. The infiltration team would return to the roof via roof access hatch on Building C and make their way back to the western corner of Building 55.
10. Once there, they would contact Prometheus via micro-transceiver [just within range] and he would fire another grapple line to the roof.  Killroy would tie off the line and remove the grapple [again, to leave no physical evidence].
11. The team would zip down the line to the ground outside the perimeter and apply the catalyst stick to the line.  They would then enter the vehicle and drive away.
12. Bookie would reset the scan distance for the roof camera to close the gap.

The next thing to check would be for magical defenses and plan around them.  It was late [both in game and in real life], so the team decided to put that off until the next day.

End of Session

[In case it was not obvious, the buildings on the corporate campus are of varying heights, with Buildings A and B being two floors lower than buildings C, 36, or 55.  Also, the map New GM had of the campus had all the buildings numbered, but the numbers on some were blurry due to being a JPEG she found online, so we just listed the target buildings as A, B, and C to differentiate them from non-target buildings and not worry about their actual numbers.  We could retcon it to make it a form of information security – if we say Building B, no one listening in somehow would know which building we were talking about – but really it was just to keep the game going.]

[So I started having the characters build AR models of the target locations for two reasons: it would be helpful for the characters to have and you see them in heist movies all the time.  I’d like to think that in 2076 with ubiquitous AR, shadowrunners would no longer be looking at 2D maps but three dimensional representations of the actual locations they could zoom in on or virtually walk through.  Plus, I really like the visual in my mind’s eye.]

Session 1

Sessions 2 and 3

Session 4

Sessions 5 and 6

Session 8 (not yet written)

Session 9 (not yet written)

Hurricane Harvey!

Session 10 (not yet written)

Session 11 (not yet written)

Session 12 (not yet written)

Session 13 (not yet written)

Session 14 (not yet written)

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Sessions 5 and 6

[Oops!  Our router died so I spent a weekend without internet access.  I typed this up but couldn't post it (I do all my writing in Word) and then forgot once the week started and the repair guy replaced our router.  Mea culpa!]

[These sessions happened June 19^th and June 26^th, 2017, and were run by the New GM.  After writing up Session 5, I saw how short it was and how short Session 6 would be, so I decided to combine them.]

PCs

Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth

Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily

Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)

Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it

Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why

Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm

NPCs

Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser

The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant

Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin

June 30, 2076

7:23 AM

The team would spend the day establishing their cover story.  Bookie, as Dr. Reynold, called Dr. Valdi, the inside man in New Dawn Technologies, to meet for lunch.  The cover story for this meeting was that Reynold and Valdi were old college friends meeting to catch up.  Dr. Valdi picked a place off the New Dawn Technologies campus and agreed to me Bookie there at Noon.

Prometheus and Void took the list of significant Post-Awakening North American Elvish Architecture sites and started scouting them out for filming.  Two of these sites “happened” to be adjacent to the New Dawn Technologies campus, allowing for unobtrusive scouting of that site.  This led to the realization that the group was going to need another mage for the level of magical support that was needed.

Noon

Bookie met Dr. Valdi for lunch.  They spent some time “catching up” [actually explaining Bookie’s cover ID to Dr. Valdi], during which Bookie dropped the correct code words to indicate he was a safe contact.  After they ate, Bookie explained the team was in Cara’Sir and working out a plan for the extraction and Dr. Valdi should go about his business normally.  Dr. Valdi asked if Dr. Reynold would like a tour of the facilities and Bookie accepted.  He was wearing one of Sin’s FlySpies, so everything would be recorded and added to a virtual model the team could plan off of later.  The two of them went back to the New Dawn Technologies campus and Bookie received a tour of the interior as Dr. Valdi’s guest.

3:17 PM

Prometheus and Void returned to the Windsong Corporate Apartments.  Prometheus contacted The Fin and asked if she could recommend an available mage in Cara’Sir, preferably an elf of some sort.  She said she had “an elf of some sort” who would be perfect and arranged a meeting at one of the few barbeque joints in Cara’Sir.

4:30 PM

Bookie returned from his tour and relayed some of the security items Dr. Valdi had given him.  In the evenings, the main halls of the research building's first floors had basilisks wandering them, from 8:00 PM until 5:00 AM.  Each hall section was locked off and had a single trained basilisk wandering it.  Further, during the day 310 biodrones flew around the campus, disguised as part of the large bird population.  Finally, cockatrices roamed the campus at night.  This was far from good news.

5:23 PM

Prometheus and Void met Wren at the barbeque joint.  Wren was an elf…except he had round ears, round eyes, and…holy shit, he’s actually human!  Void later confided to Prometheus that Wren felt like an elf to her and if it wasn’t for her Shadowrunner attention to detail [read: paranoia], she wouldn’t have noticed he wasn’t.

Void outlined the rough edges of the job to Wren and asked if it was something he was interested in.  Wren said he was interested and they discussed what he could bring to the table.  His spell selection included infiltration spells, surveillance spells, and some offensive spells.  This was exactly the mix the team would need and so Wren was brought on board.

The trio headed over to the safe house at the Windsong and Wren was introduced to the rest of the team.  The details of the job were explained to him and the team started discussing their next steps.  The team decided more information was needed on New Dawn Technologies’ physical site security.  Ms. Johnson was contacted and a set of wireless video cameras and recording equipment were requested.  Ms. Johnson said she could get the equipment to the team by 9:00AM, which was good enough for the team.

July 1, 2076

9:00 AM

A set of all-weather, low-light capable, video cameras and a receiver set arrived at the apartment office from a local retailer.  Void went down and signed for it in Dr. Reynold’s name.  Sin did a quick check on the cameras and set them for encrypted transmission.  Void spent the next two hours deploying them in hidden locations with a clear view of the east end of the New Dawn Technologies campus.  Sin set them to record for the next 48 hours.

The team spent the next two days in character as their cover, driving all over the city investigating Post-Awakening North American Elvish Architecture sites.

July 3, 2076

Noon

After a morning filming Bookie pretend to be too drunk to record architecture lectures [very successfully I might add], the team returned to the safe house to review the recordings of the New Dawn Technologies campus.  What they learned wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great, either.

The video confirmed that cockatrices roamed the campus at night, but they were confined to the perimeter by a series of fences.  Further, the biodrones were only active during the day.  At night they all returned to roost in hutches on the other side of the campus from the labs the teams was interested in.

One thing the video showed that Dr. Valdi had not mentioned were video drones on the rooftop perimeters of the buildings.  The drones moved back and forth along a guidewire all night, providing regular, but not total, video coverage of the grounds around each building.  On the plus side, they appeared to be wireless, so Bookie should be able to hack into them, but only one at a time.

This was going to take some serious planning.

End of Sessions

[There was much more to the discussion between Bookie and Dr. Valdi, but I wasn’t involved and didn’t get much in the way of notes because I was helping the new player finish up his character, Wren.  Wren’s player is a friend of mine from back when I ran a game store and was one of my employees until he went into IT for better money (retail doesn’t pay that well and I eventually followed that path as well).  His job recently transferred him to a site near where I live and my wife and I had a spare room, so he moved in with us and became available for the game.  (He is not the first roommate we’ve had and the amount he kicks in helps with bills.)]

[We started late for Session 6 and it was mostly an information dump by New GM, so a separate write-up would have been very short.  Therefore, I combined sessions 5 and 6.]

Session 1

Sessions 2 and 3

Session 4

Session 7

Session 8 (not yet written)

Session 9 (not yet written)

Session 10 (not yet written)

Session 11 (not yet written)

Session 12 (not yet written)

Session 13 (not yet written)

Session 14 (not yet written)

Session Report – Code Name: Parrot T-Rex – Session 4

[This session happened May 29th, 2017, and was run by the New GM.]

PCs
Void – female night elf physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily
Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth
Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)

NPC’d
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant


June 29, 2076
[NOTE: A correction to the last set of session notes – Killroy was travelling as a bodyguard, not as a grad student.  My error.]

The team arrived at the Seattle train station to take the bullet train to Cara’Sir in Tir Tairngire.  [Yes, I know the bullet train officially does not have any stops between Seattle and San Francisco.  Here it does.]  The team was carrying their new false IDs and nothing that couldn’t be excused with a license.  Except Prometheus, who had a couple modifications that were patently illegal, notably his Dynamic Handprints.  Everything else was packed away in Sin’s GMC Bulldog, which was smuggled across the border the previous night and should be waiting in Cara’Sir already.

The ride to Cara’Sir was barely 15 minutes in length.  Paranoia spiked amongst the player characters at Customs.  It was observed that the entire set of Customs personnel was replaced just before the PCs got to the front of the line.  When Customs wanted to shuttle the Awakened player characters [Baelthor and Void] to a separate room for magical scanning, Killroy insisted, as their bodyguard, he go with them.  This caused a snarl until the Customs supervisor OK’d it.  The three were led to a side room, given a cursory scan by a Customs mage, and then sent on.

The other spot of trouble was with Prometheus, who declared his “medical augments” and then provided licenses for the most obvious ones.  The Customs agent asked why he needed Orthoskin, bone lacing, and muscle replacement.  Prometheus simply replied, “I’m a bodyguard.  Those are the result of occupational hazards.”  The agent was non-plussed at the response, but decided to reluctantly accept the response and let Prometheus pass.  [We’re pretty certain that Ms. Johnson was to thank for the relatively easy time we had getting through Customs.  This made us even more paranoid about her intentions.]

Once through Customs, the team hired a taxi to take them to Bertucci’s, the only Italian place in Cara’Sir.  The Fin had arranged for a local fixer she knew to meet them there.  At Bertucci’s, the team was escorted to a reserved table where this gentleman was waiting:

[Image borrowed from the Internet]

He introduced himself as Dai, their local facilitator.  Prometheus asked for an update on the competing teams and Dai promised he would get that to Prometheus by the end of the day.  The team then ate while Dai provided them with an overview of how things were in Cara’Sir.

After the meal, the group headed to the east side of Cara’Sir, to the Windsong Corporate Apartments.  “Dr. Rithrandir” [Bookie] had a suite of rooms reserved as the team’s base of operations for the filming project.  The suite was on the 4th floor and conveniently had a view of the New Dawn Technologies campus, about a mile away.  Bookie immediately set to scanning the suite for listening devices while Baelthor started assensing for any kind of spirits or magic.  Both came up empty.

While waiting for the suite to be cleared, Sin found a comfortable chair and went looking for his Bulldog via his RCC.  He located it in a parking lot near the Columbia River.  Sin jumped in it and activated the sensor rig.  No one was inside it or in the immediate vicinity, so he started it up and drove it out of the parking lot.  Still a bit paranoid, he parked it in a different lot a couple miles away from the Windsong Apartments and jacked out.  He then had Dai drive him over to Bulldog and scanned it for bugs.  He found three he had not planted himself.

Sin then hooked into his own bugs and checked the recorded video.  He found recordings of the smugglers looking around inside the Bulldog and finding one of the smuggling compartments inside it.  Rather than take anything, they decided to plant bugs and see who they might be able to blackmail.  Sin contacted Bookie and explained the situation.  Bookie jacked into the Matrix and scoped out the bugs there.  The bugs were low-grade, so he hacked them [disabling a data bomb in one of them] and programmed them to send a fixed image of the interior with lighting changes for the time of day and the weather.  Bookie then followed the bugs’ transmit signal to a location on Hayden Island where the smugglers were based.  Bookie sleazed into their security system and set up a back door for later use.

While Bookie was doing that, Sin cleared the bugs from the Bulldog and drove it over to the Windsong Apartments.  He and Killroy then moved the team’s extra-legal gear out of the Bulldog and into the apartment suite.

End of Session

[This session took more time to cover less material than the New GM expected, mostly due to player paranoia.  That said, we achieved getting to the job site and set up, feeling mostly secure.]


Session 1
Sessions 2 and 3

Sessions 5 and 6
Session 7
Session 8 (not yet written)
Session 9 (not yet written)
Session 10 (not yet written)
Session 11 (not yet written)
Session 12 (not yet written)
Session 13 (not yet written)
Session 14 (not yet written)