Been a while since I did one of these.
So for the last few months my wife and a friend of ours have been playing Shadowrun. I tweaked the timeline a little so that I could set up a few things for some in game shenanigans. Little did I expect though that the two of them would be successful in pulling off the stunts they did.
To be quite honest I had set up three occasions on which there could be a TPK in one night unless they were very lucky or chose to avoid the situation entirely. A dark luck was with them.
As many players of Shadowrun know, unless you are set up in advance big risk may not always equal big reward. And usually when you get the big reward someone is waiting to take it away from you. Well these two actually managed to not only get the big reward, but then built on it by selling things to interested parties. So yeah this is building up quite nicely to get a TPK just from their own actions… So what do they do to really escalate things …
They bought a tank.
Lets say that again… slowly.
They. Bought. A. Tank.
Then they bought a way to transport it.
Now then folks who play in my games know that I have a reward style that is usually along the lines of “Yeah you can get that… here let me make a few notes about everyone who would find out about that and want to mess you up for it…”
And then for giggles they had street kids paint it up with … with… seriously this is messed up… Hello Kitty… They covered a tank in images and the standard colors of Hello Kitty.
Oh it gets worse.
As they are not a corporate or military power, I had put a timeline into place that would mean they were getting raided and having all these toys taken away from them. I wanted to build up the drama. However they decided to leave the Seattle Metroplex. They were using a refitted… well the best way to call it out would be a zeppelin.
There are other story bits about them evading detection and using multiple flight plans and spoofing transponder codes, but eventually they get to their target. Chicago. In the timeline we are running Chicago is Bug City and its nasty inside the walls.
Do you see where this is going?
They para-drop the tank, and some supplies and fuel… into Chicago. They told me their flight plan and how they wanted to fake out the military watching over Chicago. They succeeded. The thing is, from their flight plan I had come up with a couple of places they could drop the tank. Then I let the dice handle it.
They made Chicago worse… Read things about Bug City, and the Universal Brotherhood in Shadowrun reviews and history sites. And you will see how hard that little statement is to fathom. They made… Chicago… worse…
Ok so I know what you may be thinking. That I could have put a GM Fiat in place at any time. I could have shut this down and taken away toys. I let it go and now I am paying the price.
To a certain degree, that is true. But I have a lot of fun racking all this sort of stuff up and then springing something epic out that will give them a run and they can feel it is all worth the build up even if it does kill everyone.
Ok so gimme the dice… I need to roll up some consequences….
Gimme The Dice 