[h1]My Players Turn Back![/h1] If you're one of my players, you should [b]STOP READING ALREADY AND GO DO SOMETHING ELSE[/b]. Like click on [url=www.google.com]this link,[/url] to find something else to do, or [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage]this link[/url] or [url=http://www.cracked.com/]this one[/url] or [url=http://www.badassoftheweek.com/]this one[/url] to kill hours of your lives, or [url=http://www.nyan.cat/]this one[/url] to get a tune stuck in their head for [i]days[/i]. [h1]Background on my game[/h1] Okay, so! First, some background, some brief stuff my players have done in the near past. They went to Mars, or were already on Mars, to investigate the disappearance of a Firewall asset. In the early game, my older players (imported from my Star Wars game,) kept dropping out because they weren't into the setting, so I said their characters kept being compromised/going missing. They managed to make a lot of enemies in a very short amount of time. The Shui Fong and Oversight [i]both[/i] want to get their hands on one of their egoes, because she was [i]very public[/i] about the NEFARIOUS DEEDS she did. (The Autonomist Alliance, OTOH, hailed her as a hero. She got a Gold Star! "Abolitionist hero" and "Villain" are entirely matters of perspective.) Along the way, they were introduced to a Barsoomian shot-caller named Alec Parker (I SO ORIGINAL! Someday, they're going to meet a spaceship engineer named Arthur Asimov,) were entrusted by being allowed to visit and make use of a SEEEEEEEKRET Autonomist-founded body bank/black clinic, incinerated a bunch of TITAN war-nannies with an FAE, and got away with a quarter-gram of fullerened anti-uranium in a shell sized to be fired out of a decently sized, but man-portable, mass driver. (The total yield would be 10.86Kt, effective yield (accounting for the energy which escapes as neutrinos and doesn't do much of anything,) about 7 or so. So enough to put a goodly sized hole in a city.) They didn't keep the weapon, thankfully. It's being sent off to a Firewall research lab. Anyway, after doing all of this in an [i]amazingly[/i] short amount of time, Jake Carter (Of MARS! 9(No, not JACK Carter. (Nor Jon Carter.))) [i]strongly advised[/i] that they get their asses off Mars, because they made some powerful enemies, Oversight and the Shui Fong among them, as well as at least one and possibly two other groups who are as-yet unknown to them. So, they got their asses off Mars, to the [i]Get Your Ass to Mars[/i] swarm. (The players who went MIA mysteriously were said to have executed their own independent exit strategies.) This is home turf for several of my players. Anyway, there they are, and after an only-slightly-contrived instance when several of them wound up at loggerheads over what to do with a man who was fleeing from hypercorporate life who had been found to have held and authorized indenture contracts in the past, all retired to a bar & grill on the ship and had lunch and got to know one another. (An NPC the old players like was going to airlock him without spacing him, inject his corpse with medichines to keep it from expiring, slurp his ego out of his stack and send him riding a beam back to Mars, one of the new players, who met the man in an individual session concerning his (the player's character's) missing wife, was adamant that that was literally only happening over his dead body. The "want to airlock him" crowd backed down.) Anyway, that about sums it up, and if you're one of my players, you HAVE BEEN WARNED! [h1]The problem I now face.[/h1] So! The last game I ran was basically a search for Violet Perdido ([i]Sunward[/i], Elysium write-up's author; she wound up on the Swarm too,) that got arc-welded to the second half of [i]Mind the WMD[/i]. My original plan was for my players to find Violet, and then be tasked with scrambling to provide arms, armor, and equipment for the incoming premade protagonists of [i]Mind the WMD[/i], but they managed to bollocks that up entirely by being in the middle of [i]burning down the black kettle they were beaming into[/i] when they arrived. So they had to improvise. (See above: re: using a Barsoomian-affiliated Anarchist-run body bank that's very, very secret.) They faced the Triads, they narrowly avoided facing the cops. They faced (unbeknownst to them, though not for much longer and if you're one of my players REALLY STOP READING NOW SPOILERS AHEAD,) the Night Cartel and a "group" of radical posthumanists composed entirely of altered forks of one guy, who wanted the nanoswarm to study and try to reverse engineer for advantages for themseves. This time, I'm thinking something different. No enemies who will willingly engage in them overt conflict. Masterful hackers. Brilliant social engineers. Sabotuers. Infolifes. [i]Assholes[/i], in other words. Going up against these guys should be like going up against Aiden Pearce. If you're not 100% on your ball, you're going to find seemingly innocuous parts of your environment exploding next to you. The eyes will always be on you, but you have no idea who's controlling them. They won't engage in open combat until you're already bleeding and almost dead, or you corner them. Basically, a group of Shadowrunners, only they haven't got the troll combat monster and the blaster battlemage that most such groups feature. (Note to self: stat up a Troll biomorph.) Anyway, these guys are on the Swarm to perform NEFARIOUS DEEDS. Mostly, they're there to make money by ego-hunting people that other folks will pay good for. They aren't in it for the politics, they've simply decided that the Swarm is a good place to rake in the money by cashing in the egoes of people who are worth money. This is going to bring them into conflict with my players. One of my players is worth a goodly sum of money to the Shui Fong. Their i-Rep will take a dive if they get forknapped and captured, because then Jake will have to arrange for an Erasure squad to hit the Shui Fong's metaphorical mountain, put holes in all the officers, put a gun to the mountain master's head and explain to him in no uncertain terms that he's pissing off one of those large and deadly powers in the dark that his little criminal organization does not need as an enemy. And that's problematic, and then they have to have a Vector cover it up if the Tong looks into who hit them, making it look like they pissed off Oversight or Project Ozma or something. So that would not be ideal, nope. Moreover, some of my players (that one who's valuable in and of herself,) have taken upon themselves the duty of generally securing the fleet, so if folks start turning up with their backups erased and stacks popped, they'll have to investigate. To drive it home, some NPCs they're connected to are also going to be targets: Jon Carter (the recent expatriate from hypercorporatism,) recently met someone on the Swarm, after that whole "FUCKHEAD wanted to airlock him" incident. She's been flying with the Swarm for the last eight years, but before that she was a Consortium security bigwig. [i]Very[/i] big, in fact; as in, her biometric authorization was required for the release of nuclear warheads on Quarian big. There are still people in the Consortium who very much want to know what happened to her, and are willing to pay very good money for her to be returned. FUCKHEAD is himself wanted, because he very publicly took place in the same attack on the Shui Fong hotel, same as the player. The tong is willing to pay good money for the opportunity of killing him with a myriad of swords, then resleeving him and killing him with five thunderbolts. The rest of the kill-team that hit them with my players are also very wanted, for exactly that reason, though none so much as Laowai (my player) or FUCKHEAD. While the players were at the black clinic, they met a small family of Martians who were there while their daughter was given a full gene-fix treatment. She was in a bad way, because her parents were both GRM-locked Rusters produced by different companies, so her morph was made of fail, and the companies considered her existence an unauthorized derivative product and when asked for help, told the parents that they'd have to stump up an exorbitant fee, and should be thankful that they'd let their daughter continue to exist on the morph at all, rather than demanding she be desleeved and the morph destroyed. After she went into the healing vat a cripple and came out healthy and whole, the parents decided to go for a spin as well. Because fuck GRM, that's why. Anyway, this whole thing was done out of (a) primarily humanitarian concerns, but (b) secondarily, to raise support for the Movement among the less-far-flung communities of Rusters who had closer ties to the corps. Unfortunately, someone in their home habitat ratted them out, and Oversight was waiting at their home. Fortunately, the Movement figured this out before they were even out of the clinic. They laid it out and were about to suggest new names and faces, but then their man inside Overwatch indicated that Overwatch was [i]really[/i] hot to get their mitts on these people, and the plan changed to "Getting them off Mars." Fortunately, the Scum were more than happy to smuggle them off for a small material donation. Unfortunately, the assholes are going to be more than happy to grab them, or a fork of them, to collect the reward for the information about the black clinic. The key to this, I think, is denying the players any opportunity to pin down a target and just kill them. The answer to "Why don't ya just shoot the bastard!" should range from "because I can't FIND him!" to "because he doesn't exist as a physical entity!" The way I see it, the Assholes should be at least four in number. 1: The Point Man. When push comes to push, [i]someone[/i] has to have sticky magboots on the deckplates. That's this guy. He's as armored as he can be without standing out, he's well-armed without being obviously well-armed. He uses all the cheapest tricks available - stunner first to immobilize, etcetera, as well as being a competent hacker in his own right. Basically, fighting this asshole should be like fighting an evil Aiden Pearce. Ideally (from his PoV,) you'll literally never even see him, the only time he touches you is to pop your stack and inject you with nannies that scramble your brain whilst still leaving it a viable morph. Even on his own, he uses cameras, he avoids standing out, he changes everything about himself frequently, and he can make shit explode next to you, whilst in a corridor on the other side of the barge. 2: The Hacker. If the Point Man is a good hacker, The Hacker is an infolife mastermind. If the Point Man is an asshole about using all the physical dirty tricks, the Hacker is using most of the electronic ones - Speed 3 and the most advanced eidolon that can be bought or stolen off the black market. The only ones the Hacker won't use are the ones based around multiply forking, because the Hacker can't get along with itself. The hacker is in charge of maintaining the Assholes' VPN, doing info research, long-term intrusions and the like, and if need be will attempt to destroy/corrupt/hack/delete enemy infomorphs. 3: The Tech. I'm thinking a Swarmanoid morph for this one, or else a Mimic. This one is very good at getting into places even most Scum can't go - maintenance ducts, vents, the outside of ships, etcetera - as well as hiding. Very stealthy, very assholeish. When things need a physical override, the tech is there. When things need to be sabotaged, the tech is there. You get the picture. 4: The Social Engineer. The Asshole's Face is very good at setting up fake identities and maintaining them. Consequently, the Assholes can count on having cover IDs with high @-Rep scores, so they not only don't stand out, they actually look like they're on the good guys' side. The Social Engineer is also very good at manipulating people and events, so that people who attempt to take down the assholes will find the Assholes protected by the very people they plan to, or are, victimizing. The Social Engineer also burns identities that need to be burned, and uses favors and money to cover for the rest of the team. Ideally, these guys should be capital-T Trouble. They're here to turn a profit by screwing with the [i]Get Your Ass to Mars[/i] Swarm, and there's a lot of money to be made by screwing them, ranging from the petty pranks that other Swarms would pay good money to see played on them, to the murderously ruinous sabotage that certain hypercorps would pay to have happen. (For instance, two of the barges in my GYAtM are actually small-ish asteroid habitats which they basically stole from Fa Jing. Fa Jing wants payback, and would love to see, for instance, the nuclear reactors on the uranium-rich asteroid which is microwave beaming power to the other ships go supercritical, or to see the beehive which is such a virulent hotbed of anti-hypercorp aggression explode.) And of course, there's the boring-but-steady work which is kidnapping people's stacks, either to get at the seekrets inside before dumping them, beaming them back to people who very much want to have a copy of them to torture or extract secrets from, or even occasionally to return a wanted criminal to see justice. Albiet their own form of justice. Sometimes. They're not picky. If there's credits on offer, they'll work for anyone, from the ID Crew to the Titanian Commonwealth. I'm fairly sure I can build these Assholes. What I'm not 100% on is the tactics they use. I don't just want to handwave things for the sake of "You're not supposed to be able to find them yet," and then have my players later go "But what I did TOTALLY should have found him, given what we now know!" I seek advice from more experienced gamemasters. And non-GMs who feel they have useful input. And really, anyone who isn't one of my players. :)