Shadowrun 2069 Campaign Report 2 – Things Go Wrong

No new Seattle Scream since last time (but you can find a link to issue 38 here) but there will be for the game in April.

Our team is hired to retrieve 20 cases, each weighing 50kg, from a warehouse that was owned (and 60% used by) the SmartShop Corporation with external security provided by Lone Star.  The cases were in the section of the warehouse that SmartShop subleased out to other companies and individuals, who provided their own internal security.

Even though they are under a 48-hour deadline, things started out well: the group had a semi truck and trailer ready, the hacker accessed the security feed for the subsidiary warehouse and delivery data, plans were starting to gel.  Then, Tigara, semi-official team leader and stealthy dude, decides to sneak in . . . which did not go as well as he would have liked, slashing his pants leg open on the razor wire and made it in without setting off any alarms and avoiding being spotted by the patrolling rotodrones.

Once inside, Tigara avoid being run over by an automated forklift and finds the area where the cases should be and it is in an area where cargo crates have been stacked to form an enclosed area with one entrance which is watched by a large dog.  He scrambles up the crates, finding the top covered with cargo netting.  He looks down, noting several piles of boxes that might be their targets, and three guards chatting and drinking coffee and starts placing disposable surveillance cameras.  The hacker, making sure the cameras are working, notices an alarm light on the guard’s computer, before they notice it, and she lets Tigara know.  Instead of leaving, Tigara keeps moving around.  The guards noticed the alarm, one goes out and the other two stay.  The hitters of the team load up in the truck and head in, just in case, spoofing the outer security.

Inside the warehouse, one of the guards calls out for the “little mouse” to come down, Tigara does not, and so the guards don gas masks and set off a gas grenade on top of the crates.  Tigara then jumps down inside the boxes with the idea of grabbing a gas mask, unfortunately, he is bound to the rat totem and cannot overcome his reluctance to initiate combat before the guards start shooting him.  The guards are using gel rounds and start beating Tigara down, the dog joining in.  The team hitters rush in, scaring the workers off the loading bay, and gun down the  dog and the two guards.  Tigara is picked up by his ‘flying ninja’  drone which flies him out to the waiting trailer.  The rest of the team grab the cases and then decide to grab more, filling three pallet jacks and dragging them out to the trailer.

As they prepare to pull out, the two Lone Star rotodrones drop down in front of the truck and demand that they surrender.  They do not.  The drones open fire and chew up the front tires of the truck.   They shoot down one of the drones and the hacker temporarily disables the other as the truck pulls away and starts barreling for the exit.  At this point, Lone Star unleashes the other four rotodrones which start attacking the back tires of the trailer as it speed up and crashed out of the compound.  A runners versus drones firefight developed with two drones destroyed, one damaged and one hacked into immobility.

As the truck rolls along (as best it can on its ten non-shredded tires), apparently safe from pursuit, Moonshadow calls for the meet with the employer who informs him that Lone Star has mobilized an airmobile ESWAT team to intercept the truck and that the meet was off.  Moonshadow contacts the team who look up and see an Lone Stone modified Ares Dragon heavy lift copter, they ditch the truck and scurry off into alleyways, sewer and wherever they can with the Ninja Flyer and the hacker’s Steel Lynx drone joining the fleeing.

They paid back the advance they were given for the mission is an attempt to salvage some reputation from this disaster of a mission.

Notes:Sorry about this being so long but I was also trying to piece events back together for my own reference.

Seven player game, so much confusion as usually, but things all went wrong when the stealth character decided to fight rather than run.  Interesting to watch a run fall apart in such a spectacular fashion.  It was also this teams first mission failure.