This weekend I put the player of the hacker character in charge and I played an Orc Magician (
Sheet Here). He has never GM'd before, and his entire experience with shadowrun is just from playing in my game. I told him on the sunday of last weekend so he had an entire week to read books and stuff.
My Orc is supposed to be an Ex-Lonestar agent who worked in the Magical Response division. Due to some sort of Matrix calamity (so far undefined, probably just during the Crash 2.0), he lost his identify with them. Instead of trying to pick up the pieces, he turned to shadowrunning. It's not that he loves the law enforcement aspect specifically, he just loved the challenge of taking on new mages every day. Shadowrunning does that just as well as anything when you just lost your SIN.
Players This Week
| Player | Race | Archetype
|
| Hunter | Elf | Street Sam (Taser+Katana)
|
| Greg | Human | Adept (Sniper Rifle)
|
| Charlie | Troll | Sorcery Aspected Magician
|
| Me | Ork | Magician
|
My tradition is "Warlock", which is the Intuition tradition I made up that "the corps hire most often when they need an intuition magician" (because they already have hermetic for logic and shaman for charisma). Spirits are Guardian, Guidance, Air, Man, and Task. Oh, and the other magician is a troll that's using Wil+Cha for drain resistance, because he's sticking by the "Thousand Swekel" tradition he made with his first mage (who was an Elf with Cha7). It is silly, but passable, and fits the running joke he's built up about his characters always being incompetent at what they try to do regardless of game system or any other concerns.
So we were hired by a Johnson to destroy an AI that had been stolen from them. 17K to keep it fairly quiet, or at least keep it from being traced back to them. We were only given a map to the building's location, and no other info about what they did.
We did a Datasearch to try to get some research on the building's contents. I got 1 hit and was able to place the minimap we had of the area into my larger map of the complete city. Yay! The Sam did a check despite his horrible chances (2 dice) and managed a critical glitch. "you think that the stuff you're looking for is on the third floor". Oh, and I had also found out that the first two floors were a sporting goods mega-store.
I scouted out the area by going to the sporting store. I got me some 100m rope and Geko Tape Gloves with spare cash because I didn't have any and they seemed to be both practical and the kind of thing I could buy at a large sporting goods store. Looking up at the third floor from the second using astral perception didn't reveal anything particularly obvious. Later I flew back with Astral Projection and scouted a bit more. Two mages there saw me and tried to tell me to move along, but then I heckled them about how "we're all on UCAS territory here, who gives you the right to tell me where I can and can't go? Who do you work for that's so important?" and so on. They didn't want to actually say who they were working for, so we both just grumbled and scowled and went our separate ways.
Now, lacking a hacker, we had to come up with a plan for how we'd destroy this AI. We figured that if you just physically ruined all the machines that the AI was being kept on then that would do it, and we had a whole 4 kilos of grade 12 C4. Use C4 on the server racks to break everything. A better plan has never been devised, ever.
So we go up to the building at night. I'm projecting, and the other three are going in on foot. The Sam looks for a blind spot in the exterior security cameras and climbs up the building (4 stories) onto the roof. There's a roof access and a "break room" shed. He ties off some rope and the magician and adept climb up too. I believe it was at this point that the Magician cast a force 6 with 6 hits Improved Invisibility spell on the Sam.
Oh, did I mention how they were gonna get in? They would make a distraction down on the ground floor by blowing up the front door with C4, then all the guards would go down there, and then they'd sneak in via the roof. I called up a watcher to count how many people were in the building at the moment, and then while it was counting them I called up a Force 6 guardian. Due to some unlucky rolls I ended up with only 1 service (0 drain though, after soak).
Why did we do all this? Because the roof access was maglock'd and no one had a key or way to bypass it, so the plan was to just kick in the door, which would have been loud and obvious if there wasn't a distraction.
Having now set in motion the second best plan ever which would lead to the first best plan ever, the guard in the shack and a janitor in the shack run out onto the roof to see what the blast was. I was manifesting at the time and talking to the physically invisible samurai. The other two were "hiding" on the side of the shack that didn't have the door, out of line of sight. They end up seeing only me, standing there manifested for seemingly no reason:
```
Guard: "What? What are you doing here?"
Me: "Uhm, There was an explosion! Quick, you go check to see that everyone is okay, and I'll go get reinforcements! Hurry!" (Con: 2 hits on 4 dice)
Janitor: "Uhm, Okay" (0 hits on 2 dice) *runs over to the edge and looks down*
Guard: "Uhm" (1 hit on 2 dice) "I guess" *begins going to the edge*
```
At this point, the samurai gets the idea
"i'll run up behind him with my sword to his throat, and tell him to give me his keys"
"But, if you do that, and you're invis, then he'll struggle against the weird invisible force, and then with your sword to his throat he'll probably just die"
"Then I'll just hit him in the face with my katana and take his keys"
So he did so. The Janitor had gone all the way to the ledge right away, and the guard had kinda gone more slowly and he was kinda eying me too in the process. The samurai ended up putting the guard 1 overflow box away from death with his attack, and he took his keys.
GM "are you going to do anything about the janitor?"
Sam "Uhm, he's at the edge looking down? I'll push him over the ledge"
GM "Whaaaaat?"
Sam "Yah, he'll fall right in front of the doors that we just blew up and cause more of a distraction."
GM "That's a terrible plan"
Sam "I do that"
Me "you'd probably make an unarmed attack against him or something, and if you get enough then he's knocked off the ledge"
GM "Sounds fair"
*rolls all that*
GM "Okay, he falls off the building"
*I looked it up, a 24m fall deals 24P damage*
*GM rolls 0 on the soak test*
GM "He goes splat"
Whatever, we have the keycard inside now, so we went in. We went down the stair well to floor 3 and explored around. There were no computers, but there was a single large space in the middle of the floor that no door led to. I went through the wall and found that it was part of the computer complex, and there were some stairs up to the 4th floor. We had to go up and then we could go back down. So we go up to the 4th floor, but by now the guards have begun to organize and some of them find us on the 4th floor. There's only two at first so the adept uses his sniper rifle to kill them mega-dead. I go look around the corner and see four more guys approaching, so I use my Guardian Spirit on them. He was force 6 with Elemental Attack (Shock) and Natural Weapon. He looked kinda like Zeus and he could throw lightning javelins, or fight with it in melee combat. My spirits were quickly taking on a greek mythos kind of theme, and everyone liked it, so I went with it. He eliminated 3 of the 4 guys by the time the adept even got around the corner and sniped the last one.
They made their way into the server room and the hackers in the building were beginning to use some signal attacks. However, The adept had 4 in Electronic Warfare with a Signal Defense spec, and the Sam had 2 with a Signal Defense spec, so with him assisting the adept, the signal defense on the team was quite strong. They didn't manage to get a Backdoor or anything. There were also two mages hiding at the far end of the room. They called up a Fire spirit, but then were shot dead in an instant by the adept, and the spirit went away on it's next action (we decided that it worked like banishing when the summoner died).
They placed the C4 and I called up a second guardian spirit. The plan was for them to get away, set it off, and then I'd hang around and have the guardian smash up whatever was left over. They did that, everything got broke'd, and then my spirit materialized and broke'd it some more.
Johnson: "You... weren't that discrete. But you did eliminate the AI, so here's your money"
And then I used my money to buy a better Firewall and IC program, along with a Terminate Connection program. I also considered getting one of those Rigger Capsules you can get for vehicles (that armored coffin kind of thing) and then keeping it in my apartment and staying inside that while astrally projected. I only had 5k spare after my software stuff though, and I wanted to keep cash on hand for the next mission. We also got 2 BP, which puts me well on my way towards my first initiation.
Michael will also be in charge next week, we'll see what happens then.
