Ye Olde Abandonede Warehouse
Last night we had the complete gaming group together for the first time since the Shadowrun game started. Jesse’s razorgirl and Amy’s decker joined in as the group looked for a place to hide their rock singer. The group procured a rent-a-squat, obtained food and water, and decided to turtle up and wait out their contract.
Of course, this is an action game, and the bad guys found their hiding place pretty quickly, considering that no one on the street should have known yet where they were or even who they were. (For any of our runners reading this, yes that is a plot point. Think about it for the next two weeks.) The group had to deal with a nasty mage and a group of gunmen, but Starr’s and Jesse’s reflexes knocked out the mage and a thug quickly, while ptownhiker went Bowling For Mooks and “force pushed” three of the others into a confused pile. I think telekinesis spells are going to be his signature.
To everyone’s surprise, the rockergirl turned out not to be totally useless, blowing the head off one attacker with the entire clip of her Browning. Our heroes did find the phone number of the person who’d put a bounty on their heads, and Jesse’s character recognized the intricate tattooing on the Japanese mage who’d attacked them. We left the group victorious, but with quite a mess on their hands, and much to decide about what happens next.
We still need practice with the combat system: the fight took longer than I’d hoped and I didn’t involve fixitup, lewisw, or Dwight as much as I wanted to. I’ll correct that, and still, everyone claimed to have fun. The real-life geekiest part turned out to be Amy’s decker; she lives several states away now, so life imitated art: her character stayed hidden away in her Matrix workshop, hacking a bank account and researching several topics for the group, as Amy herself communicated to us all by webcam over the Internet. I had to resist referring to her as “Control” or “Operator” all evening. Almost every portable object in 2070 has computer chips and local wireless access in it, which led to a laugh when Amy hacked the firewall on one thug’s pistol and ordered it to eject the clip before he could shoot.
GM fail of the week: I set up a meeting reminder notice in Google Calendar, accidentally pointing Starr’s reminders to her work account. Google proceeded to send her a couple hundred notices before I redirected them to her Gmail. Durrr. On the other hand, I think I may finally have talked Dwight into signing up for a LiveJournal account. We’ll see. Well done, all!
If I wasn’t already running a campaign of my own on alternate Monday nights, I’d be seriously tempted to try running a remote rigger or the like.
Most of the games I’m currently in usually have at least one remote player via text, but there have been assorted problems with trying to move to a more high-tech virtual presence. Lack of an easy + cheap (free) + reliable multi-way video chat is one kicker, and until recently some people were stuck w/o broadband.