[Shadowrun] Session 3 Silver Angel pt. 3 Perfect Run

This one was again a rather short session. It literally was just the rest of session 2, but a week later. It took all of 90 minutes and then we were finished.

They already had planned stuff out beforehand, so it was mostly just a matter of running through this, figuring out the details of the plan, and getting in.

Of course then the twist happens, but they were well ahead of that and managed to get around it.

Their main plan was getting into the facility via the sewers and the air ducts as before during their scouting missions. They were using a small arachnodrone to get in there, all the while the cat Shaman did watch out on the Astral plane.

The hacker managed to capture first the security cameras and afterwards got into the file store to download the rather large file.

I had previously wondered how to deal with the matrix role when we don’t play with a decker, and decided to introduce an NPC called Cypher.

Cypher can do everything, but only on the matrix. He/she cannot take part in the physical part of runs, but they can do basically all the things that are needed. It would be stupid if they would fail rolls and ruin the run without player input, so if something goes wrong in the matrix it will merely cause a delay, not complete failure. Cypher is good.

They have their own agenda though, and one that might be at odds with the PCs.

In any case, the run went off nearly without hitch. There was another team (Fuchi-funded) breaking in and trying to get the same file, but thanks to the planning by the players they were mostly left with a tripped alarm when the arachnodrone moved out of the air ducts.

The last the players heard of them was gunfire from the research center, as they hightailed out of there.

Successful mission.

There will be a few news items available later on, some of which might tell the players absolutely nothing.

One thing that never was established in the lore was what that Silver Angel file was actually about to be so in demand. I assume it’s some cybertech, but as I said it never was picked up again.

Next weekend Glimmer’s player will GM the first part of Harlequin. Looking forward to actually playing again.

[Shadowrun] Session 2 Silver Angel pt. 2 Bellevue Sewers

A shorter session this time, our kid’s birthday party cut into it.

Previously the runners had found out the research center they were trying to rob had busted security sensors on the lower level, which also housed their target. With some fortuitous rolls on the contacts they had (Glimmer has exactly the right contact) they decided to do some advance scouting from the sewers.

They used Puppeteer’s contacts as an excuse to buy multiple kegs of beer for the meeting of the Association of Jewish Housewives of Seattle (his fixer’s dummy org) and had an unfortunate breakdown behind the Cavilard compound.

They entered the sewers there and soon found the right access point for the center above. Unlike the outside they found access through the pipes to be possible via remote drone.

They didn’t know where they where at first, but managed to find their way into a ventilation shaft, and from there through the pipes. Unfortunately they had to notice the target room was running on a seperate system, leaving them in front of the door.

Luckily some patient spying made them discover that the maglock at the door was busted. Still, their spider drone did not manage to make its way in.

A short joint in the astral also showed that the place was accessible on the astral via the same way, but that they also were handling (and disposing down the sewers) some very toxic materials.

The plan now seems to be to use the drone at the right time to enter the server room, while causing a distraction otherwise. Maybe not too wise, but ok.

Oh well. And that’s where we had to stop. I really can’t play with my kids around, they really make it impossible to properly play online. I have to find some other way, maybe lock myself in or go out for it. But I am also not happy having to give up on my desktop setup for it. That all is kind of stupid.

We intended to continue on the next day, but the kids were absolutely beastly that evening again.

[Shadowrun] Session 1 Silver Angel pt. 1 Running Circles

Seattle Space Needle by Cacophony, published under CC-BY-SA, modified by me

We finally managed to get a game going. It took a while. Again. This doubles as my private notes of what was happening.

Dramatis Personae

* Misrule, a Haida Shaman

* Glimmer, a Haida Assassin

* Puppeteer, a Dwarven drone rigger

Rules were Shadowrun 3. This might have been a bit of an issue later on.

The shaman and the assassin in-game are sisters, which explains the presence of two Haida in a single group.

The PCs were recruited by some gangers coming up to them in their daily life. They were invited to Matchstick’s, a private club in Downtown, a 1920s speakeasy styled bar.

Inside they met Eve Donovan, a fixer all of them were at least fleetingly familiar with, who offered them lots of money for a good and quick job. Three days later, at exactly 2am, they were to steal a file kept in an isolated system inside the Cavilard Research Center in Bellevue. This needed to be synchronized with a job in the Philippines at the same time.

They received a map and some basic information. Matrix overwatch would be done by a NPC decker called Cypher, but he/she first needed access to the system.

A quick successful check got some information that a fleeting acquaintance of the assassin from her MCT days used to be the security director of the facility, before being fired for a rather embarrassing scandal (someone from the security company had used MCT computers to program a computer game).

They went on to investigate the facilities they were supposed to enter, the rigger using his roto-drone for some surveillance, the shaman astrally projecting to gain a lay of the land. Security was deemed sloppy, but they could not actually enter properly.

The acquaintance of the assassin was found, plans to kidnap him were squashed when they realized he had become a leading figure in an organ-legging gang in the Barrens, calling himself “Blood”.

(insert exasperated sighs from the players)

A meetup was requested via contacts.

In between they received more information from contacts in the metroplex government. There is a known issue with the security sensors on the lower levels, and one of the contacts had a reasonable layout of the sewers in Bellevue.

Their plan is now to infiltrate via spider drone and I will have to work that out more.

A meeting with Blood was performed and concluded successfully, leaving them in debt for a favor with Blood, but giving them access to a rough map of the building, and giving them some additional hints.

I have the feeling they are thinking of this whole thing a bit too lightly, and I will have to rework the scenario for next time so it won’t be a complete disaster. They completely missed out on one line of inquiry, which will lead to one news article about a murdered NPC they haven’t even met.

The use of the spider-drone might be an issue with the rules. It certainly is in the rules, but I think it would not have been available in 2050, when the game is set. They also were trying to investigate the building more in the astral than the author ever thought they would. Anyway, it helped that the security for the target really is not that great.

Next time…DEATH IN THE SEWERS! (probably)

Note: I took the chance and now am asking my players to name the session after the game.

[Shadowrun] The Matrix of Yore

Have you ever looked at how the matrix worked in old Shadowrun? I mean really old, first edition Shadowrun? Because it’s fascinating in the most awkward 80s kind of pre-www way possible.

Not that it actually is unrealistic, as I should know and as people have pointed out to me quickly.

You see, the matrix rules for Shadowrun came at a time when the World Wide Web, that thing which most of you will think about when I say “The Internet” did not yet exist. Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989, the same year that Shadowrun 1e was published (and the setting had it’s first publications even before that). The Internet is of course older. Usenet was around for a decade already, and Arpanet was established in 1969. Those were three decades for people who were interested to learn how this whole global information highway thing actually works. Of course the whole model was based on that, and not on a new invention from Europe of all places.

But the problem was that this whole description did not really fit with what people thought about the internet during the 90s. The internet WAS the www, and so later editions had to dial down on the whole model of a network that was thoroughly local in structure, even if it allowed for access to computers globally.

The whole matrix in the sixth world was structured into local telecommunication grids (LTGs), regional telecommunication grids (RTGs), and so on. And servers were more like fortresses than anything you willingly would let anyone on. The early descriptions of company presences on the matrix are devoid of most things that involve outsiders accessing information on them. In effect giving the idea that anyone who ever would want something on a company network was either authorized, or a bad actor.

Which all is not actually so far from the truth, but it doesn’t fit with how people experienced the internet at all.

But there was the idea of a Tron like virtual space, fighting against attack programs and barriers, which enticed people. Of course the way this was treated was very much informed by DnD: every single host you might want to hack into was basically a mini-dungeon the decker (the SR-term for hackers) had to hack into to find the information or controls they might be interesting in.

By the way one of the big complaints about Shadowrun in the first few editions was that the use of decking skills ground the whole game to a halt, leaving the rest of the team nothing to do while the decker and the GM were off on their own little dungeon crawl. That is the reason why later on, with the advent of wireless matrix in 4th edition, all of a sudden everything became hackable and you had to be physically close to do stuff. Now there was a reason why’d you want the decker to come along on the run.

Anyway, the reason why I was mentioning it were these parts I found in the SR1 rulebook. Because how do you know where the company even has their local host you might want to hack?

Not so easy it turns out.

So, to even hack something you need the LTG access code. This is supposed to be an unlisted phone number basically that allows access to the computer system, and at least Silver Angel treats it that way, (one of the big clues the PCs can find is the LTG code for the research institute they want to rob), but the later Seattle Sourcebook just gives the LTG number for every single entry. And as the sourcebook is technically completely player accessible (it’s a BBS post after all), this all becomes a bit of a moot point.

But in this system the LTG code becomes a treasure you need to acquire. You have to get it from somewhere, as even just searching for it might raise an alert on the target. Which also is in Silver Angel, the fixer warns the PCs that they better keep quiet about it, because otherwise Mitsuhama gets spooked and that would endanger the success of both their mission and the parallel mission running on the other side of the planet.

But notice how this thing sees looking into a phone book multiple million pages long as some hard and arduous task. Remember search engines did not exist yet when this was written, at least not in this form. Even when they started to appear they started out as curated archives (I remember adding my first little homepage to yahoo and other places hoping for it to be found), before Google actually started to have an actually useful search algorithm and a usable website.

Anyway, how are you supposed to deal with the whole amount of LTG numbers you are supposed to have the players access. Oh, look at this:

The GM is supposed to have their own list of LTGs to use when a player wants to hack into an LTG.

But notice that this is not public, the players are supposed to keep their own phone books.

Basically making this into… a huge mess of paperwork and note taking that adds nearly nothing to the game.

No wonder they got rid of that part soon enough. I am prepping stuff for 3rd edition right now, and this particular idea is just not present anymore.

But ok, I do have to admit it does have a bit of an old school allure. Like treasure maps in DnD games, the LTG code is something that not everyone has in that model. First the characters have to hunt down the code, then they have to break in like that. It kind of evokes some old school cyberpunk charm that nobody even thinks about nowadays. I guess it would be a plot token that might be useful in other scenarios as well, but I also think it would get old pretty quickly. And… I don’t think I have seen that particular need to find the actual code in other adventures. In later scenarios this mostly is glossed over I think, but Silver Angel was the first one to be published (with the GM screen). I guess it is assumed that you still are doing this stuff somehow, but they really dial back on this part of the game.

[Shadowrun] Prepping Silver Angel

Club Owner Contact from Silver Angel

I am prepping to run Silver Angel this weekend. One of my players and her wife asked if we wanted to do some Shadowrun again. Over online, which is a trend that largely has passed me by these last few years as I had to deal with two small kids. I already had prepped Silver Angel a few years ago, but now I somehow should figure out how to run this over Discord, maybe with a basic virtual tabletop on the side.

There has been a bit of trial and error here. I thought at first that maybe I should use draw.io to present stuff via screenshare, as this would make it look really neat, but then I realized that maybe having a virtual tabletop might not be bad considering how difficult situations can arise in a Shadowrun game. Of course now I am trying and failing to find the right battlemaps to represent all the right stuff and I still need to figure out how and what music and sound effects to play, I need some of the portraits that are missing from the module, and how exactly did this exploding dice rolling bot in Discord work?

It’s all a bit more complicated than I thought.

I got into all kinds of different websites the last few days, and then gave up in frustration with a few of them. It shouldn’t be so hard to actually manage some stuff, but it is.

Like, I looked at Diceweaver, which has some really snazzy organizational tools, and then I tried to start the VTT and it sucked. And I think the reason might be more my ancient kind of computer, but in the end it took time away that I don’t have right now.

Right now it looks like this:

• chat and voice: Discord (as this is easy to get into)
• infos and presentation/whiteboard: draw.io Desktop version (technically a diagramming app, but I know it already from work)
• virtual tabletop: owlbear.rodeo (quite barebones but worked the best so far)
• Storage: Gdrive
• Battlemaps: r/battlemaps is your friend
• Audio: tabletop audio is nice

So what about the module? What’s a Silver Angel?

Actually, that’s not even clear from the module. Runners are tasked with stealing a file from a corporate research facility in Bellevue, Seattle. In all the module and the canon afterwards it never is made clear what the file contained.

The module is interesting because it is the very first published scenario for Shadowrun outside the scenario in the core book. And that scenario was Food Fight, which was just an excuse to shoot at each other. Now the first properly published scenario was DNA/DOA by Dave Arneson [sic!], but Silver Angel was a pack-in with the GM screen.

It’s hardly anything to write home about. If you have run Shadowrun for a bit you might have created a scenario like this. But that’s just it. This was the model that Shadowruns emulated. It doesn’t have quite the same format that other scenarios would later adopt, but the tropes are mostly all there.

It’s slightly different than usual in that it has a fixer who also works as a Johnson and wants to take part in all the meetings, but that’s ok in my opinion. It’s supposed to give the GM a voice so they can limit useless ideas.

The rewards are somewhat large in comparison to normal, but that also can be excused by this being an urgent mission that needs to be done well (as in “Cheap, Fast, Good, you can choose two”).

One of the oddities of early Shadowrun is the insistence of having the computer system of the place mapped out as a dungeon replacement. This… did not work. The whole matrix as dungeon crawl concept ground the game to a halt. It was soon enough reworked, and even those reworked rules had to be changed for later editions. Starting from 4th edition hackers/deckers had much more stuff to do as they could hack devices they just found on the run. We are going to deal with this by not dealing with it at all. There’s going to be a choice of NPC deckers who take care of the computer side of things. We agreed on that beforehand to keep everything from stopping and listening to the decker and the GM as a solo run.

It is an interesting time capsule for sure. Back then the whole setting was much less defined than it became just a few years later. With only a few publications to it the system seemed…small. The references in there kept reappearing. The fixer was Eve Donovan, who was a minor character in the reworked edition of the Into the Shadows anthology (only in the 2nd ed. where they replaced the first story though). We get told that Mitsuhama is a computer company, because we don’t know that. It’s all very much new land.

Frankly I don’t know what to expect. The whole scenario is a but thin. The way it is presented it will either be too short, or too long. I already have thought about adding the Food Fight scenario from the main book as a side encounter. Maybe some additional random encounters for flavor.

[Shadowrun] Seattle is a prison

I have been working on a game set in 2050s Seattle lately. So I started to try and understand the setting a bit better to get the feel for it. Which is a bit funny, considering I played the game since the 90s. But this was supposed to be for new players that did not have so much exposure to the setting yet.

And here is something that hit me only after decades of playing: Seattle in Shadowrun is a city state surrounded by foreign lands, and cut off from the rest of the nation it belongs to by at least two international borders.
Seattle has a population of more than 6 million, 2 of which are SINless.
In the 6th world of Shadowrun a SIN is basically the thing that marks you as a citizen, and in a lot of cases as a person. Someone without a SIN does not exist according to most governmental institutions.
A person without a SIN cannot go to school, hold a proper job, pay taxes, open a bank account, get a credit, or even call the police.
They do not even count as casualities when killed, and the police will stop investigating crimes when they find out the person was SINless.
And here we come to the problem for these people: there is no way out of this. They are effectively imprisoned in the citystate of Seattle.
As a SIN is used as proof of citizenship, someone without a SIN is not elegible to cross an international border legally.
Did I mention that Seattle is surrounded by international borders?
Now truth be told, the border there is not the Berlin Wall, and there are lots of examples in Shadowrun fiction about people crossing it comparatively easy. But it still is an international border. A normal person trying to live their live as easy as possible will not think about sneaking through those. They will see the border fence as an insurmountable wall. Sure, runners will go over there twice a day and check back in the evning to see if they left the oven on. But a normal person doesn’t. A normal person without a SIN sees the border and sees a wall they can’t cross.

There are 6-7 million people in this city, and 2-3 million of those can never leave this place.

Just something to think about.

In later editions this gets even worse. In 4th and 5th edition (in the 2070s) everyone has to broadcast a valid SIN constantly, and not doing so is reason for arrest. So all of a sudden these 2 million people are not only limited to Seattle, but also unable to even enter (or work in) places like Downtown, Bellevue, or Tacoma.

Scenario ideas: 

1. Police for Hire: the police won’t care for the problems of the SINless. In fact they might arrest the SINless instead as it is easier on the paperwork. If a SINless person is murdered and the police doesn’t care, maybe they hire runners for an investigation
2. Manhunt: A hunting association has taken to the most dangerous game: they are now hunting SINless with impunity. Someone hires the runners to stop that (this in fact is the plot of one of Michael Stackpole’s Wolf and Raven stories)
3. Sabotage: a landshark wants to gentrify a neighbourhood and force out all the SINless that have been living here for decades. The runners are hired to stop him, somehow. (this one might have shades of the A-team)

[Shadowrun] A Night’s Work (1990 Shadowrun Promo)

Action! Magic! Matrix! Cheesy CGI! Improbable 80s hairstyles! This one has it all!

[Shadowrun] Run 1.1: Speakeasies, Devil Rats, and lots of Pizza

So, we had our first session of Shadowrun 5th edition today. It was a bit of a surprise for me. I had the rules beforehand (only as a pdf though, which was hard to read from), but I did not actually plan to do anything with it. Then my players actually asked if we could play some. It seems they didn’t play the pen and paper game yet, but they did play Shadowrun Returns.
It went ok, I guess.

We did not actually get far, despite the fact that I consciously had my players choose archetypes from the books instead of creating characters by the priority system. But then it turned out that one of us had to go on a spontaneous business trip in the morning, and another had to be home earlier. So, we managed to get the meeting with the fixer, the meeting with the Johnson, a single fight, and some legwork in.
On the other hand we want to meet next week again, which would be a record for our group.
The group consisted of a Chinese Ork gunslinger with triad ties (the archetype from 4th edition), a covert ops specialist (also from 4th), a black dwarfish decker with an online persona modeled on the Ms. Marple novel (the archetype from 5th ed.), and an occult investigator with an alcohol problem (also from 5th). I considered properly converting the archetypes from 4th edition to 5th, and then realized that the ones from 5th edition are wrong anyway, so I just did some basic conversion stuff to be able to get going and left it at that (well, I calculated the limits for the characters). If they get hooked on the game I might be able to create proper characters with them, so far those were mostly just so I could show them what was possible.
I also made pizza and salad, and one of my players brought tiramisu brownies, so that should have helped keeping the mood up.
I should have studied the combat rules more intently. I wanted to do some test fights against some opponents, but in the end I did not have the time for that. And that was after I had a week more to grok everything. Basically I only grokked most of the rules on Thursday. We were supposed to play last Saturday but had to reschedule, so that was not possible. So, after another week I now felt able to do it properly. It was a partial success. The Shadowrun 5 rulebook is slightly obtuse.
The characters met up (the decker only as an icon) in a dingy pizza place in Seattle Downtown, some dive that mostly was kept alive as a front for the owner’s fixer business. In a sort of emergent gameplay the characters all ordered a pizza and demanded to see the manager, which we established was the way to get an audience with the fixer. We soon came to the conclusion that that this also was the only reason why this place made any money to begin with.
The owner, a huge ogre called Mario, told them about a job. They were to meet their Johnson in The Speakeasy, a 1920s styled bar with some period-appropriate backrooms, and some less period-appropriate jukeboxes in the entrance hall. Hey, its all 20th century, ain’t it?
The Johnson was a mousy type who clearly was nervous. The job was simple: a datasteal from a small soda factory in Tacoma. The runners even managed to fret out the guys motivation, which either means I was playing the role really well, or just way too transparent.
After a few initial investigations the runners met at some dive bar in Redmond (The Crash) the occult investigator knew. She knew the bartender and asked if they could use the attic. Sure, the bartender said, if you don’t mind the rats. They did, but they agreed to take care of the rat problem, found out that the Ms. Marple-like icon they met at their fixer was actually a tough black dwarf, and then tried to take care of the rat problem.
And here I encountered the problem that I A) underestimated how tough devil rats are and B) did not completely figure out the combat system until 3 rounds in.
The combat took longer than expected, especially because I had to revise the rules constantly.
It took me nearly the first round before I noticed that yes, devil rats have a physical limit of 3, so they actually can’t have more than three successes in unarmed combat and defense rolls, even though I nearly burned a hole into the table with my successes.
The players on the other hand rolled mud. Most rolls they had did not even hit enough to start hurting the rats, and the ones that did glitched out at the same time. In the end it took 3 rounds until the decker finally managed to hit one of them by sheer luck. Two of the rats were finally killed by a spirit the occult investigator summoned, and that more because I couldn’t find the rules for spirits and did not want to bog down the game too much. Also I wanted to get on with things and at least I did roll successes for the spirit.
So then they had some planning and some legwork. After a short planning session one of them went out again to investigate further, he broke into an nearly abandoned property next to the factory and did some reconnaissance.
And then we had to stop.

Lets see what next week brings.

I remembered again what I liked about the game back when I played it more often, around 2000. The adventures are easy to do, the system is maybe not intuitive but easy to understand, and the background allows people to do a lot with their character. The world is just close enough for them to get into their roles properly, but far enough to have some really great worldbuilding in the game.