Sunday – 24 December 2017
Last night, my gaming group got together for another Shadowrun session. It was a little touch-and-go as to whether or not the game would actually happen earlier in the day, but it did.

Game night!

I quite enjoy my group and running games for them. Most of my players are (relatively) new to the world of Shadowrun, while others have experience from the computer/console games. Watching them come together to experience the pen-and-paper world of the late 21st Century has been fun and occasionally highly entertaining. Case in point…

In our last session, the group had been contacted to find a missing person. And, as they were leaving the meeting, they were contacted by another agent to do a semi-related job, finding an item that the missing person was investigating. Serendipity AND more money. They followed some leads to the person’s last known location: A room in a fairly upscale hotel. They didn’t find the person, but another set of clues that led to a location in underground Seattle.

That’s where tonight’s game picked up. They walked into the location (see map)…

(c) Catalyst Lab Games

…and right into the middle of a gang war. Literally into the middle of it. So, they did what any intelligent adventuring party would do: Dove into the nearest cover – the ladies’ restroom. Or, rather, they tried. Two players had… issues: One stumbled and slammed into a wall, making her a target for getting shot. (Hooray for armored clothing!); the other… just… fell and almost got his head caved in by an exuberant – but very clumsy – ganger.

Members of the party, leaning out of the women’s room doorway, open fire on Gang #1 (on the right, near/around #1 on the map; Gang 2 was on the left, near the big red arrow)… just as the first wave of cops is hitting the top of the steps to the underground. Shots are exchanged to little effect. The team’s mage decided to cast a wicked stun spell on a massive radius, centered on the nearby gang. And she was SERIOUSLY successful. Five of the seven nearby gangers dropped. So did some tourists. Go figure. Then things got ridiculous:

  • Stumblebunny finally makes it into the restroom.
  • NEXT ROUND: More shots fired.
    • Decker (computer hacker) decides to hack the optics of the last two nearby gang members.
      With goatse. (DO NOT LOOK THAT UP)

      • He was successful and, not surprisingly, they stopped shooting, just as…
    • The cops arrive at the top of the stairs to the underground level.
    • Mage’s turn: She casts a spell on one of nearby gang duo, making him think that he’s COVERED in insects, even inside his clothes.
      • Again: Raging success. So… he starts stripping.
  • NEXT ROUND: The cops hit the level where the fighting was going on.
    • So, a couple cops are like “WTF?! Why is he getting naked?!”
    • Three cops decide to head down the corridor and confront the other gang, who are still shooting. Because…  gang.
  • NEXT ROUND: Mage decides to cast another spell. “Swarm,” making the cops coming down the escalator think that they are in the middle of a swarm of bees.
    • Again, wickedly successful – it hits most of the cops on the escalator.
      • They lost their shit…
      • …for about 5 seconds, until the cops’ combat mage dispelled it.
    • As the three cops head down the hall to the left (towards Gang #2), one of the party flips a flash-bang out the bathroom at them… as the mage is celebrating her success, like this:

      (click image)

      For clarity’s sake, I asked if that’s what her character was really doing. She said “Yes.”
    • Flash-bang goes off.
    • Cops – in helmets and riot gear – shrug it off. Two of the three cops head down to face Gang #2, Cop 3 throws a flash-bang into the bathroom.
    • I just looked at the group and told them, “I don’t even need to roll this. Everything goes black. For all of you.” For a moment, they thought I killed them.
  • Eventually (20-30 minutes later), they all come to, surrounded by 20+ not-so-happy cops.
  • …when a 3m tall troll (cop) walks up. The team’s negotiator decides to go kind of hard-ass, while the Infiltrator (stealth guy/think “rogue”) is basically, “Yep, we’re shadowrunners,” when the troll cop asks what they’re doing there.
    • The cop-mage was also casting “read thoughts’ and “detect truth” when the troll cop was asking questions.  He kept saying that the negotiator was telling “mostly truths, but there’s some… grey… in there.’
    • Wasn’t making troll cop overly happy.

The best part of the troll cop asking questions sequence was the out-of-character conversations going on around the table, because half the party was ready to throw the mage under the bus for casting the swarm spell on the cops. To be fair, in the first adventure we ran, the mage tried to use her stun spell to stop a magical creature from escaping a zoo enclosure. She put two of her teammates to sleep instead. There may be some lingering resentment about that. Oops.

 

As I said above: I enjoy my gaming group.