Current Campaign Log

This is the second SR4 campaign I've run in Parkersburg.  This time around we decided to focus mostly on magic. magic-using characters, and magical enemies. Therefore, we set up the team less like a shadowrunning team and more like a legitimate paranormal investigator/exterminator company, where each character is an operative in a pool of talent that is on the company's payroll.  I also set it up like this because it is summertime, and all us have many summer plans that often conflict with scheduled gaming, so I wanted to attempt to set up the adventures in a very modular format so that we could play through an entire scene in every session - with the idea that it will make it easier for characters to drop in and out of the scenarios if the players can't always make it to the next session.

So, with that being said, our current cast of characters include (character sheets are coming soon):

1. Balor - Team leader, support sorcerer with some offensive ability, magical tank.
2. Burning - Team face, sorcerer and pyromaniac.
3. Grinder - Sorcerer who specializes mental manipulation (Influence, Control Thoughts, etc.)
4. Boximus - Cybered street samurai, specializing in long range/sniper engagements
5. Strings - A life hacker - combat mage and conjurer, astral combat specialist, physical tank (when possessed by his own spirits.)

Session 1 Tuesday, June 21, 2011 (Monday, April 3, 2073)

We were contacted by Eric Glass, an astral researcher employed by Harvard. He is in Africa at the moment, but will be in Seattle by Friday. Before he arrives, he wants us to locate a persistent mana warp site in Seattle or the surrounding UCAS territory. He offered 15K nuyen up front, and 15K nuyen upon confirmation of the site by his personnel. He also offered to pay us another 10K to pave the way for his teams to access the site, and 5K for any meaningful research pertaining to the origin/history of the site.

We called our contacts and made some inquiries. Strings did a Matrix data search. We ended up with three possible leads: a Stuffer Shack, a club called Aurora Seattalis that caters to Awakened patrons, and a retirement community called Peaceful Pines, where there is an "evil" aura in the air.

We decided to check out the Stuffer Shack first, and Strings found numerous Matrix posts where magician wannabes had posted comments about the place, coordinating visits to see what was really going on there, but there were no follow-up posts to explain what happened with the visits. There were also numerous complaints posted on other nodes, concerning the clerks, who were apparently very rude and aggressive. He also found a floorplan of the place and a general inventory of stocked items.

Session 2 Tuesday, June 28, 2011 (Monday, April 3, 2073)

Burning and Grinder jumped into Burning's Westwind while Strings, Balor, and Boximus rolled out in Strings' Land Rover. When we arrived at the Stuffer Shack, Strings left his possessed body in the car while he and Grinder did some astral recon. No one in the building was magically active or heavily cybered, but the freezer was warded on the inside, and was powerful enough to obscure any assensing tests done to determine the nature of the life form inside the ward.

Strings remained astral while the other four entered the Stuffer Shack. Burning chatted up the clerk closest to the cooler entrance and distracted him while Grinder turned invisible and slipped inside the cooler. The freezer was in the back, and it had a heavy padlock on it. Boximus acted like he was getting a cold drink from the back of the rack, and handed his autopicker to Grinder, who used it to pop the lock. The freezer was empty except for a warding circle painted on the floor.

Grinder left the freezer and hung out in the back hallway where he cast an Influence spell on the clerk, hoping to make him confide more easily in Burning, who was having trouble getting information. After the spell took effect, the clerk told Burning that they got lots of magic types trying to poke around in the freezer, and he offered to show Burning where the freaks liked to go.

Balor assensed astral space and determined that violence had occurred in the store in the recent past. Even though the site was obviously not a mana warp, the team decided to investigate further to see what had been going on.

Burning followed the clerk into the cooler, followed by invisible Grinder. The clerk saw the lock was missing from the freezer and made some excuse to walk to the back of the cooler, drawing Burning deeper inside, while Grinder remained near the door. A few seconds later, Grinder and Burning were nearly knocked out by an odorless and tasteless neuro-stun gas that had saturated the cooler area. The clerk returned, wearing a gasmask and wielding a stun baton, which he used to completely knock out Burning. Grinder cast a Mind Control spell on the clerk, but was rendered unconscious by the gas before he could issue any orders.

Strings had one of his spirits possess and animate Burning's body. He grabbed the clerk and smashed him through the racks of bottled drinks, carrying them both out of the cooler and into the store.

Meanwhile, in the store, Balor had moved to face off with the second clerk who was still behind the counter.

Balor saw the clerk reaching for a weapon and knocked him back with a manabolt. Boximus drew his laser pistol and finished off the clerk. A third clerk by the hot food counter shot a submachine gun burst at Balor, but his armor stopped the rounds. He moved around the counter and hit the gunner with a mana bolt. Boximus finished him with another shot from his laser pistol.

Grinder's vitals were being fed to the rest of the team via a biomonitor slaved to his commlink. Realizing that he was in trouble, Balor shifted to astral perception so he could see his invisible teammate and yanked him out of the cooler before the gas killed him.

Strings jumped back into his body and with Possesed Burning's help, got Grinder and the surviving clerk into the land rover, where he cast Heal on his teammates and transferred a possession spirit to the clerk, to keep him subdued.

Meanwhile Balor checked the two clerks he had fragged with spells and made a show of trying to save them with a med kit for the sakes of the numerous witnesses, even though both men were dead. Boximus ran to the office, confiscated the comm node for the shop, hoping the video survlieance was recorded locally. He found a safe, managed to crack it with his key sequencer, and obtained the a certified credstick with 6K nuyen on it, a mixed bag of spell fetishes, two Force (2) sustaining foci, a Force 3 counterspelling focus, an encrypted Hermes Ikon comm link, and a bunch of worthless wannabe magic junk accessories.

We left the scene, with Boximus driving Burning's car. A little later we stopped and Strings Astrally projected back to the scene to erase the team's astral signatures before Knight Errant arrived. He also shattered the ward in astral space, revealing a low-powered spirit who was in the shape of a little girl. Before he could react, she giggled, waved, and vanished to the metaplanes.

Boximus rendered some first aid to Burning and Grinder, and once they woke up, Ginder used his Control Thoughts spell to force the clerk to unlock the commlink. Further interrogation revealed the clerk knew nothing of value, but the comm link told enough of the tale.

The clerks were bottom feeders, trying to get a chance to join a magic hater group known as the Hand of God. The HoG had set up the trap and were using the clerks to spring it on anyone who took the bait. The victims were robbed and then beaten, raped, or otherwise tortured to death. The comm link holds multiple videos of the torture sessions, along with contact info for the HoG operatives that were working with the clerks. Burning killed the clerk with an Ignite spell.

The team decided to put the certified cred stick and cash from the safe loot into a communal fund for the business as a whole. They wondered what they should do with the commlink and its information, and they prepared to go to Aurora Seattalis later that night.