>>17693217
First up is Valk, a human lady born of a wealthy corp family with a rather alarming interest in cybernetic augmentation. A former combat biker, Valk squandered her family fortunes and borrowed not an inconsiderable sum of money from Renraku to finance her near-full-body cybernetic replacement. As a result of all this, she has a surprising amount of armor, as well as physical damage boxes and a pain editor to boot. Unfortunately for Valk, it means she also lives in a wino-infested bolthole next to a bunraku parlor in the East End of London; she can't move out because anywhere else would cost money and she cannot pay that rent *and* pay Renraku at the same time.

>>17693232
Next we have Song, a neotenous ork girl chaos magician mystic adept. Yes. Song is cursed with the gift of amnesia, and all she knows is that she was found on the banks of the Thames outside the Lambeth Containment Zone by a street doctor, she can cast magic, she can shoot guns, and she has a lot of funky 'ware in her head. Little Song also has crippling flashbacks whenever she sees the Adams-Hoffman corporate logo. More on that later.

>>17693250
Artemis is a gruff satyr chick on the run from the rest of her merc outfit in Bogota. She made a deal with some Amazonian smugglers to get her out of the country, and she still owes them big for that. Artemis came to the UK with only a few things: her milspec armor, a crate full of guns, and an outstanding bounty on her head from her former employers, Proelium Industries. Artemis currently shares a flat with Song in the East End.

>>17693257
Next up is Pidgin, an elf with some fancy cyberlegs and not-too-shabby skills in talking to people and stabbing them in the face with her elbow spurs. Pidgin runs a courier business from her East End flat with her roommate, a Jamaican troll by the name of Creole. Creole has a shady past in the Caribbean League (he taught Pidgin some fighting techniques he picked up in Azzie arenas and he spends most days locked in his room smoking lots of deepweed), but we'll get to that later.

>>17693269
Lastly we have Brandy, a hipster girl Technomancer from the West End. Still the picture of teenage naivete, Brandy is looking for her brother Jerry, who left the house one day saying he got a new job that would let them live "anywhere they wanted" after he was done. Jerry never came back. Brandy spends lots of time on the Matrix, cruising for info on Jerry and hacking into anything that looks remotely interesting (because Black Hat, her Paragon, tells her to). More on The Truth About Jerry later.

Side note, today is a twofer, since I ran two sessions last week and didn't write them up until now.

Session the First:
>In which a milk run is planned, and things get a bit sloppy

It is Friday, March 5, 2072. The characters awake in their respective domiciles and go about their business for the day, turning on the BBC News programme for the latest headlines. Amidst all the boring news about toxic fires in Liverpool and Jonny Spinrad buying out manatech assets in Europe, one particular item sticks out: the Premier League Championships are being held in London tonight, featuring Arsenal FC and Saeder-Krupp going head-to-head for the title.

At about 7 p.m., everybody gets calls from their various contacts that somebody's looking to get a team together for a job tonight. All they have to do is make their way to the West End Underplex at 9 p.m. to meet Mr. Johnson at Underdome; being punctual for this meeting is highly advised. Valk immediately sets out for the West End, ejecting a hobo from her apartment before hopping on her bike to drive across town; it's not kickoff time yet and GOD's up and running smoothly, so the streets are fairly navigable despite the influx of footy fans in the city tonight. Valk makes it to the Underplex by about 7:30 and pays the bouncer all of her money as a bribe to get in the door of Underdome. Song, Artemis and Pidgin decide to do the logical thing and use the Matrix to research London's transportation grid and the Underdome. They get a few useful pieces of information, namely that Underdome isn't just a club, but rather a cavern-sized sports bar dedicated to watching games in AR, and the three girls decide to use the Underground tube station to get across town. They meet on the train and bond over the awfulness that is the London tube network of 2072- the train arrives fifteen minutes late, and at one point stops on the tracks entirely for an hour and a half. Getting antsy, Song decides to investigate using her Clairvoyance spell, and sees a roadblock up ahead on the tracks.

>>17693315
Unfortunately, Song also rolls well enough to see the Adams-Hoffman logo on one of the pieces of metal used to construct the roadblock, and lapses into a flashback, twitching on the floor of the train car while images of sterile surgery rooms and men in white coats burn themselves into her brain.

Investigating the blockage, Artemis and Pidgin are told ever so kindly to piss off by some unseen ruffians that claim to represent "the Grey Order"; being without most of her guns and milspec armor, Artemis decides that discretion is the better part of valor and doesn't push the issue, electing to wait on the train until the blockage is cleared. Brandy walks the two blocks from her West End flat to the Underplex and arrives at Underdome about the same time the train crew does.

Inside, the runners are all directed to table 43b, a table that is still on the main (astroturf) floor of Underdome, but is at least not in the middle of the AR action, so to speak. At 9 p.m., they are met by two men: Mr. Johnson, a broad-shouldered man in a tailored suit, and an ork poser chav thug who introduces himself as T-Face, proclaiming to the girls that he has arranged this little meeting so that he, Johnson, and the ladies can get cozy and rich. The group is unsure about this, but several of them need the money quite badly and so they agree to hear the Johnson's offer.

>>17693333
The arrangement, Johnson says, is a simple one. At 9 a.m. on Monday morning, John Ashton, the Chief Financial Officer of Carrington Financial Group (a AA Britcorp) is due to speak at a shareholder's meeting at the London Stock Exchange. The runners' job is to make sure that Mr. Ashton is late to that meeting. For this service, the team will be paid 20,000 pounds. If Mr. Ashton is not late, they will not be paid. The team accepts the offer without so much as a shred of haggling or negotiation, and Johnson leaves, dragging the grinning T-Face with him.

The team decides to go to their nearest hideout, but because Brandy's player is a paranoid ninny, Brandy is only willing to take her new coworkers as far as her van outside on the surface. They get in and start doing some digging on the Matrix, finding out a few things about Carrington Financial and John Ashton in particular (he's a shrewd businessman who's taken CFG stock to a recent surge, but he's very old and his health is deteriorating and they can't find a physical address for him). Before they can get more info, however, there is a commotion outside and the sound of bottles breaking against the van- the footy match is over, and a large mob of angry Saeder-Krupp fans is outside, looking for trouble!

>>17693339
Session the Second:
>In which burglaries are planned, botched, and first blood is drawn.

So the group is trapped in their van, surrounded by angry football hooligans. Valk decides to play the hero, leaping from the van to confront the mob. This goes poorly for her, doubly so as she is wearing an Arsenal jersey. She is grabbed and about to have her head stoved in when Pidgin peeps out from behind the van door and tells the angry mob to "kindly piss off and go torch cars somewhere else". Rolling well, she manages to convince them to go burn down an electronics store a few blocks away.

>>17693354
The girls eventually convince Brandy to let them crash at her place for the night, and while they're there, Brandy decides to do some diving and hacks into the Carrington Financial applicant database. Because she does so On The Fly (waiting is for tossers), Brandy is detected before she can find a connection to other parts of CFG's data network, and so she panics, jacking out and leaving her apartment to go hide in a Stuffer Shack in case CFG's IT Nazis send a van to come pick her up. Since Artemis has a sleep regulator, she goes too, and the two bond over cheap burritos sold to them by an Iranian man named Samir. A van passes by, carrying some armed corp types, but they don't seem to notice the nerd and the goat lady eating mexican food in the convenience store.

>>17693365
The next morning, Valk decides to do some digging for info on Ashton's car. She knows he's a technophobe, a stubborn old man who drives a gasoline car- not a common thing on London's GridGuide-happy, internal-combustion-phobic motorways. Asking around in Shadowtown, she is directed to the chop shop run by Mick the Greek; as she has no money to bribe her way in, she brings him a radiator from a busted-up wreck she finds outside (left by the mob from last night, no doubt). Mick runs a pretty sizeable operation of petrol heads, all gasoline fanatics, but even he won't tell Valk much more about Ashton's car other than that it is very nice and he'd love to get his mitts on it.

>>17693375
Desperate for info on Ashton's whereabouts at this point, the team decides to do the sensible thing and shake up Carrington's corporate headquarters. Brandy picks everybody up, plus their gear, and heads over to St. Mary Axe. CFG HQ, located in the old Crystal Phallus building in the City of London proper, is closed on Saturday, but Song manages to get through the keypad into the underground parking garage with some quick hardware rolls. She scans the tower above with her detection magic, and finds lots of cool wards and things that look like rail-mounted shotguns on the upper floors. Preferring not to begin their milk run by breaking into a AA bank (nevermind that they've technically already done this twice now), the runners come up with a cunning plan: Pidgin walks in with a package for Payroll department. She tells the desk guard after he signs for it that she also has a delivery for Mr. Ashton, and it's urgent that he get it before Monday. She manages to dupe the guard, who is able to tell her that Mr. Ashton lives off-site, in a private complex in Uxbridge, a suburb a little ways outside the city.

>>17693382
Arriving in Uxbridge a few hours later, Brandy hacks into a GOD traffic camera along the main road off the M-25 to try and catch Ashton going to and from work on Friday. Tons of cars have come and gone during that time, but they know that he drives a gasoline-only car that was imported from the Allied German States. A quick filtering of the video feed yields Mr. Ashton's ride of choice: a vintage McLaren F1.

Everybody thinks about this for a few minutes, and after a few minutes' searching on the Matrix, Artemis announces her intention to steal the car. Opinions are mixed, but eventually everybody agrees to at least go by Ashton's place and take a look. They wait until nightfall, and then Song launches her Stormcloud drone, complete with grenade launcher, to fly in the sky above Ashton's estate and provide some overwatch for the run.

>>17693393
ohn Ashton lives in a good-sized mansion in a very well-to-do neighborhood of Uxbridge; the driveways here are all gated and very long, with a 4-meter wall isolating the rest of the property from the main road. Brandy parks the van about three blocks from Ashton's front gate. Artemis and Pidgin volunteer to scale the wall, and Song casts Clairvoyance on both of them before they go over. The gun-goat and razorgirl easily climb the wall and leap down onto the lawn on the other side. These events began what I shall call the Cascade of Incompetence that places our "professional" criminals in their current sticky predicament.

>>17693402
You see, when Song placed active spells on Artemis and Pidgin, she neglected to check for Wards on the property they were about to break into (part of this is because the aforementioned intervening 4-meter wall prevented easy vision of the premises, and part of this is because Song specializes in detection magic, which means that she just doesn't think about wards much). This means that Artemis and Pidgin, when they leapt over the wall, crossed a ward with active spells up. This alerts Ashton's private security mage, who bolts up in his chair and begins casting spells. A fraction of a second later, Artemis and Pidgin hit the ground, within range of the mansion's motion detector sensor net in the garden. As they move towards the house, the motion sensor picks them up, and a general intruder alarm is sounded. This means that it is now that much more difficult for Brandy to hack into the system, as Ashton's IC is now on active patrol for intruders in all nodes.

>>17693408
The subsequent 9 seconds are very interesting. Artemis uses her Head Radar to locate the car- it's sitting in an underground garage at the opposite end of the property. She and Pidgin move to find a way into the house when a ghostly spirit appears in the air above them. The two would-be burglars get zotted with stunbolts, nearly filling their Stun tracks. From the mansion's rooftop, someone fires an arrow at Song's drone, and the poor blimp is thoroughly perforated and crashes.

Artemis wonders aloud why they don't have Matrix overwatch already. Brandy finds a hidden node in the gatehouse and logs on, only to find Black IC already in the node, looking for her. Artemis opens up on the spirit with her assault rifle, disrupting it, and the two decide to get the hell outta dodge. Running back to the wall, they shrug off yet more stunbolts to climb back over the wall and jump down the other side. The Black IC finds Brandy in the node and begins attacking her, eventually connecting. Curiously, Brandy is able to divert all of the damage from the Black IC to her paladin sprite; since she has the Macro echo, this means that Brandy cannot die from the Black IC program so long as there is only one such program attacking her, since she can just use one of her two complex actions to compile a new sprite to defend her. She is beginning to take a lot of stun damage from Fading because of this, however.

>>17693410
Artemis and Pidgin land back on the street side of the wall, but they aren't out of hot water yet. Spirits keep showing up as fast as Artemis can kill them, and the mystery bowman demonstrates an uncanny ability to hit targets on the far sides of walls; thankfully, Artemis's milspec armor bounces the arrows away, but then she botches a resistance roll against another stunbolt as she sprints back to the van, going into physical overflow and taking a nice little snooze inside her armor. Pidgin manages to dispatch the spirit by shouting at it before she can get stunbolted again. She takes off for the van, managing to get as far as the unconscious Artemis before another arrow flies from over the wall and embeds itself in her cyberfoot, pinning her to the pavement. She's still conscious, but she's in a lot of pain and she cannot currently move from where she lies next to Artemis, and even though Valk is now speeding towards her in the van, help seems so far away...

>>17693422
>>17693410
>>17693408
>>17693402
>>17693393
>>17693382
>>17693375
>>17693365
>>17693354
>>17693339
>>17693333
>>17693315

I'm afraid that's all we've done for now; we're playing again today though, and I'll try to update /tg/ sometime after this weekend on the events of this weekend's games.

>>17693429
Dammit i was loving this

>>17693445
Don't worry, there's plenty more where that came from. I just need to find another fifth of Kraken before next session to guarantee it's as entertaining as these two were.

This is shaping up to be a beautiful clusterfuck.

>>17693475

I was actually thinking of giving Kraken a try. Would you recommend it? How would you describe it's flavor?

Keep this shit on the page, you caught me going to bed but I'm so, so reading this in my TA hour tomorrow. Who ain't gotta lecture this term, that's right!

>>17693563
Quite tasty stuff for $20 rum. It's got cinammon and all the usual spiced rum notes you expect, plus nice splash of vanilla at the end.

Just be aware that it's 94 proof stuff. That doesn't sound like much compared to, say, Stroh 80, but it can catch you off guard if you're inexperienced with rum drinks (Valk's player went through an entire fifth of this on his own over the weekend; this is perhaps the biggest reason why Valk did almost nothing during our gaming time).

Loch, when can we expect the next update?

>1866
Not unless he's got a TARDIS, captcha.

>>17693598
We're playing again in about...11 hours or so? Shit, I need to get to bed!

We generally play Friday and Sunday afternoons, as that fits everyone's schedule. Friday this week will be a shorter session due to half of the players having evening commitments, but Sunday should be a nice-sized one again. If I have the mental fortitude to type stuff up on Saturday, I'll get to it then, but otherwise look for it sometime Monday after we wrap a full weekend of sessions.

for anyone that cares, I've also posted this on Dumpshock. Y'know, because CanRay needs to read about other people's games.

>Artemis announces her intention to steal the car. Opinions are mixed, but eventually everybody agrees to at least go by Ashton's place and take a look.

I think Artie's player would vehemently disagree. Of course it's always someone (or in this case, everyone) else's fault with that one. Still, I remember Valk being pretty insistent on breaking in to steal the tires.

keepin' dis shit bumped for the daytime crowd!

>>17694351
Artemis would say that anything is never her fault.

>>17693588
While I won't deny the influence of alcohol, I didn't do as much because I forgot to buy lowlight vision or anything that would let me function at night.

>>17697076
Visibility modifiers do not preclude you from helping your friends when they're in a bind. Given how quickly Valk jumped out of the van to fight the mob on Friday night, it seems a tad uncharacteristic that she'd stay in the van on Saturday night. Blame it on the alcohol, baby.

>>17697908
Because it makes so much sense for me to sneak into a compound when I can't see in the dark. Darkness is a -6 penalty modifier. If it wasn't full darkness only just dim light, I could have dealt with the -2. If you want to blame alcohol, you could say that the alcohol caused me to assume that it was full darkness (or make me forget to ask about the lighting).

I read this on dumpshock.
It made my morning and I want MOAR

>>17698139
We start play in 30 minutes!

>>17698223
woooo!

>>17698073
the owner of the van could make something like a lifestyle check to see if they have a flashlight kicking around in their van... or you could bum a pair of glasses from someone

I look forward to watching this spiral further out of control.

And we're already archived on suptg? I love you guys.

Loch, question: what does your version of the UK look like? Is it a straight copy of the one from Shadows of Europe, or something completely different?

>>17701562
I'm pulling from three sourcebooks for my picture of London: Shadows of Europe, Conspiracy Theories, and the old 1e London Sourcebook. There's a good amount of stuff that's been released on the UK in Shadowrun over the years, but unfortunately a lot of it doesn't exactly feel very British to me (speaking as a citizen of the Commonwealth). So rather than play the setting as-written, I like to use the existing fluff as a backbone and work off of that in whatever direction seems the most interesting to me. If you want to read up on the UK in Shadowrun to get a better feel for the game world I'm running with, that might help you find your footing, but I'm making enough changes and additions that someone who has read all of it before will still be kept on their toes.

My group's similarly in a pickle. Just botched an extraction in Phnom Penh in the equivalent of Baghdad's Green Zone. The target, an Esprit drone designer, is dead from a cranial bomb, the opposition's probably tied the crime to our hacker's real ID, and now they're trying to get the hell out and back to their spirit cloaked sampan before the tanks and choppers show up.

I can write it up in more detail if you're interested, but tl:dr Never get out of the boat.

>>17702207
>never get out of the boat
Curiously, this is applicable to my group -up until- they all decided to pile back in the van and book it today.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. There will be an update some time after Sunday's game, most likely on Monday between coping with hangovers and attending classes.

>>17701684

>So rather than play the setting as-written, I like to use the existing fluff as a backbone and work off of that in whatever direction seems the most interesting to me.

Always the way to go with SR, IMO. These game designers typically just read an article or two about a place. What they come up with isn't generally going to compare to what a GM with a connection to a place comes up with.

I'll bump this because I can and I like your efforts, OP.

>>17701684
Brit here, I'd enjoy hearing more of your fluff.

Loch you bastard. What happened!?

>>17710804
Very little. Due to other commitments from half the group we only played a short two hour session to finish up combat yesterday. Sunday will be a proper session, and I'll write it up after that because I don't see much point in posting a single measly paragraph.

>>17710883
curses! Alright.

>>17703594
>Be from the Southern United States.
>Read Shadowrun history.
>The South Rises Again for no discernable reason.
>Proceeds to do fuck-all for fourty years.
>Nothing written about it anywhere.

God don't I know it.

>>17711043
"God, don't I know it.", I meant to say.

>>17702207
I'd actually like to hear this story, if you're around.

You should have posted teh stuff from friday; i was waiting for it!

>>17711126

Okay, here's what's going on. I'm running it in an Indochina that's full of warfare right now. Nagas and guerrillas in Cambodia are fighting against the human royalist government in Phnom Penh, which is backed by the Esprit megacorporation, centered in France. They're allied with hilltribes and forest spirits in mountain regions of Laos and Vietnam, who are fighting the Aztechnology backed regime in Hanoi. It's very Princess Mononoke meets Platoon out here.

Anyways, my players, who are mercs on the side of the guerrilla movements, have been working with the Saigon opposition (and the Cholon Triad, often hard to tell where one starts and the other ends) for some time, but finally made enough noise they needed to get out of town. So they got a gig going up the Mekong on a Cambodian guerrilla sampan, cloaked and sped up by a spirit, and eventually up its tributary the Xekong towards the Central Highlands in Vietnam, where they will terminate the command of a "friendly" Montagnard shaman with extreme prejudice, as he's now using Twisted magic that was described to them as methodologically unsound. This should sound a little bit familiar.

This was supposed to be just a side quest when they stopped in Phnom Penh...

First, our characters.

We have an Assamese centaur smuggler who's an adept, modeled loosely after Rainbow Dash. At first I didn't like the idea much, but you know, Dash is pretty close to being a razorgirl anyways, so it kind of works. Handle is Razorhooves.

We have a shaman of Middle Eastern descent (handle Highedge, very creative) and a Montagnard ork named Leadface, both of whom are on the run from Ares.

We have a Cambodian jungle pixie; think the chick from Ferngully as a stereotypical jungle cannibal. Just joining and has only come to one session so far.

And finally and most importantly for this story, is the hacker and drone rigger/designer, Kalinka. She dropped out of Evo when she discovered her peaceful designs were being used for military purposes, and started out as a pacifist working with the Saigon opposition. This campaign's slowly stripped that away, and the Apocalypse Now arc we're in now especially has. This one was real rough on her...

Most importantly for this story

>>17716973

That last line isn't supposed to be there.

Anyways, so they're making a stop in Phnom Penh, mostly to find some medical supplies for injured colleagues on the boat, who'd just been assaulted by spirits when the boat passed through an old Khmer Rouge killing field. Razorhooves also wanted to sell some goods she'd brought upriver. So her and the other two PCs present that day, Highedge and Kalinka, got off the boat and went into town.

They met with a contact working for the Four Winds Triad, a naga-controlled operation specializing in black market magical goods, operating right under Esprit and friends' noses. He wanted them to extract a military drone designer, a Frenchman who I gave some random French name to (doesn't matter), working for Esprit. He'd had access to field reports on the drones' effectiveness containing valuable intelligence. He was staying in a hotel in the Esprit Business Complex, a fortified and "nice" area locked down by French corporate soldiers.

>>17717046

Turns out Kalinka remembers reading some of the guy's work as a fellow drone designer, and is excited to meet him.

So, they sneak into the area with some spirit Concealment and bluffing at the checkpoint. Kalinka decides it'll be easier to just use her real Evo identity to walk on in.

Anyways, so they get up there, and a glitch by the hotel computer system in reading Highedge's fake ID bumps him up to the second VIP suite, right across from the Frenchman's. Everyone but Kalinka gets enspelled invisible in there, after drinking a bit, and Kalinka coaxes him over to talk. One of his two bodyguards follows them in and stands at the veranda having a smoke, and the other stayed out in the hallway.

Razorhooves stealths over (with some Edge dice) to the veranda and uses her lightning fist adept ability to knock out the bodyguard, and the Frenchman at this point is too drunk to notice. He and Kalinka are trading ideas, and she's like, glowing with excitement. Well, Razorhooves sneaks over to zap the Frenchman, and does, but the outside bodyguard hears it this time.

When he radios his buddy and gets nothing, he decides to go loud, and blows off the door with his pistol. Razorhooves rushes the door and charges it off its hinges, pinning and injuring him under it.

What happened next, well, they should have seen it coming. They'd seen cranial bombs before and they'd been warned that Esprit's bodyguards would probably kill him before allowing him to be captured. The pinned bodyguard sends the code and the brilliant French designer's head explodes all over Kalinka's lap.

He's also called for backup. And they're in basically a military base full of French corporate soldiers, including helicopters, tanks and APCs. The target's dead, Kalinka's gonna need therapy (she got rid of her Pacifist trait after this, way too calloused and she's probably replacing it with, like, PTSD or something), her real life identity is probably compromised (unless she can take out the hotel server on the way out!).. they're really in a tight spot. The other players will probably try to help rescue them from outside, but this is going to be messy. I think it's quite possible we'll lose a PC here. Which actually would fit the Apocalypse Now thing we've got going quite well...

>>17716860
>>17716973
>>17717046
>>17717382
>>17717434

>centaurs using stealth

That said, I always love reading about your games; the way you pay attention to detail in your fluff is an inspiration.

>>17717637

To be fair, she was invisible and had relevant adept powers and skills. You don't get by in the jungle without some stealth ability. And thanks, man, that means a lot to me.

Color me surprised when I saw this crossposted from dumpshock.

Still working on a reponse for you, buddy! work's just getting in the way

>>17717434
ooooooooh, that cranial bomb sounds nasty. I wouldn't have seen that coming, personally. Tip of the hat to you!

>>17717434
oooooooooh, cranial bomb; i wouldn't have seen it coming personally, but it's a great twist! Tip of the hat to you!