Today's post was supposed to be about how my Christmas cyberpunk game went, but since due to lack of numbers/interest it didn't go, here's a previous cyberpunk game instead.
We started out with four players last week. A hunter, a reporter, a tech and an infiltrator. I sent them off on the sample mission from the book (The Kurosawa Extraction) which they carried out rather efficiently.
However, having borrowed an armoured limosine from a contact, they decided to keep it. So this week's mission began with Boone the hunter getting an email from Kendall the limo driver contact, saying that he'd been fired and the only way back into Weyland Yutani's good books was an email full of names. Or Boone and his team (now down to 3 as the reporter was off sick) could do him a little favour...
Over soy chicken substitute and worm burgers, they discussed the job with Kendall. He didn't want to work for Weyland Yutani any more anyway, but he did need a job. There was one going at Peppa Pig Pharmaceuticals, but there were a few issues, including the front runner candidate, the reference from WY which would no doubt have something about how he'd totally lost a limo, and the drug test that Kendall was definitely not going to pass.
"Why do you think you're not going to pass the drug test?"
"Why do you think?"
Boone's initial idea for dealing with the frontrunner candidate, one Radislav Braelynn, was to kill him. Kendall didn't mind what happened to Braelynn so long as he got the job, and ultimately another plan was hatched.
Some initial research revealed that while PPP had some pretty decent security, their IT was terrible, with computers running on Vista.
Loe Qi the infiltrator and Topper Harley the tech both headed into PPP's lab facility, with the help of some forged passes, claiming to be temps. Topper went to the server room to 'fix' the computers while Loe Qi headed for the labs, where he was sent to work by the supervisor technician to process 300 lab samples through the mass spectrometer.
He was able to find Braelynn's sample pretty fast, and got in contact with Topper. With the help of some YouTube tutorials they were able to figure out how to use the mass spec and run Braelynn's sample. As they suspected, he was completely clean of drugs.
Now they just needed Kendall's sample. Topper managed to figure out which lab it was in, but the nurse on duty was unconvinced by Loe Qi's requests and told him to come back with proper authorisation.
With nothing else he could do until the supervisor came back, Loe Qi got to work on the samples. By lunchtime, he'd processed all 300, and was told to take a lunch break while the supervisor got the next batch. He hung out in the cafeteria listening in on conversations for half an hour, then went back to work.
Kendall's sample was in the second batch. He'd been right to be concerned, with the test revealing a truly horrific amount of drugs for someone who was supposed to be responsible for a moving vehicle. Still, it wasn't their job to make moral choices, and soon the RFID tags on the samples had been updated so that Braelynn's clean sample now registered as belonging to Kendall.
Loe Qi got back to work running samples, while Topper dug deeper into PPP's computer systems. While getting into the security systems had been a cinch, the database was apparently rather less incompetantly programmed, and it wasn't long before he'd attracted the attention of the system's blue ICE and was kicked out of the system. Getting in for the second time was more of an effort, but at last he managed to get into the HR database and change Kendall's reference. Rather surprisingly, it was largely positive - Kendall had apparently been an excellent employee up until the limo incident. Soon the reference was suitably glowing.
Topper took one last dig into the database and managed to hit paydata - the formula for an oncology drug that had proved pretty useless for treating cancer but which did get you high.
Topper and Loe Qi left the facility (with Loe Qi leaving his paypal account details so that he could get paid for the day's work he'd done). There were no further incidents, except that the cameras that were no longer under Topper's control all seemed to be moving to look at him as he left.
Back at the bar, they met with Kendall again, who'd got the job and was willing to pay them in addition to not sending any emails. Things were looking good - although they did now owe a favour to Miss Smythe the forger, and had drawn a certain amount of heat from PPP in the process.
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We got to use the matrix moves in this session. It went pretty well - Topper is a tech, not a hacker, so doesn't have access to all the stuff a hacker can do, but with his cyberdeck he can still get stuff done in the matrix, and it didn't drag things away from the main game the way netrunning apparently does in Cyberpunk 2020 (I've never played in a game with a GM who allowed netrunners so I've never seen this in action.)
The biggest challenge running this game is keeping the spotlight balanced across the players. The hunter had plenty to do in the legwork phase, but as should be obvious from the above, didn't get to do much in the action phase. But last week I didn't feel I involved the tech and reporter as much as the hunter and infiltrator, so a mission that called for tech skills wasn't a bad call - things just worked out with less for a hunter to do than I'd hoped.
I thought running the book mission would be a nice easy start for me. No; things got easier once I was doing my own material. To the point where I'd be up for continuing this campaign some time if I've got enough interested players. The fact I was able to run it despite having been literally offline from Thursday to Tuesday bodes well.
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