$Insert_Title, Episode 5
System: Shadowrun, Fifth Edition
Cast: Mr. Fahrenheit, Hueco, Engie, Madoka, Jammer
Previously On...
At the beginning of every episode there is a short scene that is interrupted by the producer. These scenes provide background
Episode 3. A young girl, thirteen to fourteen sneaks into the backstage of a concert. There is a shot from behind the young girl towards the stage at a woman with long blonde hair and holding a black guitar. The young girl is caught by a Japanese man. The man has a fu manchu and is wearing orange tiger-striped hammer pants. He politely tells the girl to leave.
Freeze frame, record scratch.
Producer: This isn't our show, Tom. Where is this coming from?
Tom, muffled in the background: I don't know, sir.
Producer: Whatever, play our show.
Episode 4. The camera pans up on a blonde woman, about eighteen or nineteen, from behind. She is working on a desk littered with torn apart electronics, oscilloscopes, and other electronics parts. Music similar to the song from the previous episode plays through a tinny speaker.
Freeze frame, record scratch.
Producer: I'll be honest, Tom, I am started to get invested in whatever show this is from. Any more footage? Whatever, roll our intro!
Episode 5. The show opens on a dark tile floor, panning up across the rock star from the concert in episode 3. There are alarms and gunfire in the distance. She is wearing mirrored aviators and carrying an AK-97. She walks towards the door of the dark room and confers with the Japanese man from episode 3. The woman walks back into the dark room and we see from behind her leather jacket has the word Sass stitched in sequin. she kneels towards a younger blonde woman.
Sass: Tiga says we need to go. Can you do this?
The younger woman turns towards Sass, revealing that it is Stella Gamble, the Mr. Johnson from the current run. She nods to Sass.
Freeze frame, record scratch.
Producer: Wait! Tom! This was our show the whole time? HOLY SHIT.
Smash cut to title card.
Summary
A short montage of the previous episode plays up to Slag jumping from Engie's minivan. It fades to black when Slag jumps from the minivan, a gunshot is heard followed by shouting and tires screeching.
Four days earlier. We are shown a sequence that begins with Mr. Fahrenheit ushering Hueco into the van after Manifest's capture and staying behind as it drives away. Sad music plays as we see Mr. Fahrenheit slump against a wall lit from overhead by neon blue and various AR projections. It begins to rain, to further show us that Mr. Fahrenheit is feeling sad - this is a sad moment, so we are all clear here.
The music is still playing as we cut to the next morning as Mr. Fahrenheit is still trying to pull himself together. He is shown getting on a dirt bike in some more mundane clothing, and then crossing the border into the Redmond Barrens. He gets a pizza from a shop there and calls Dominic.
At Dominic's house we discover that Dominic has two boys, and the younger one has started to goblinize and is much larger than the other with small horns starting to grow. Mr. Fahrenheit and Dominic sit down and talk about what Fahrenheit is going through.Mr. Fahrenheit, for the first time, hurt someone with his magic when he summoned the walls in front of Manifest's car. It was close to killing her and he could not bring himself to stay after they kidnapped her. Dominic suggests that if Fahrenheit is not good at violence, then perhaps he should leave it to the people who are good at violence.
Dominic explains that the Chrome Bones Motorcycle Club are a group of disabled factory workers and laborers who, due to Redmond's lack of a government, have no outside support. The Chrome Bones works to keep an area of Redmond safe and to ensure that people who need cyberware have access to them. Your crew is there to help you when you need it, and Dominic suggests Fahrenheit express his concerns to his crew so he does not have to hurt people again.
Back in the present, Mr. Fahrenheit and Hueco are tailing the semi-trailer truck, both wearing the tear-away uniforms. They can see Slag hanging from his cyberarm from the semi's driver-side door, bleeding onto the pavement as they continue to drive at highway speeds.
Engie pulls some fancy moves in the minivan to swing the back end of the van close enough to the semi so that Slag can let go and fall into the back of the van. After catching Slag, Manifest begins performing first aid on his wounds after shutting the side door. Fearless, a Colombian woman carrying many guns, knives, and a bandoleer of grenades, leans out the window of Engie's fan and begins spraying the driver-side of the semi with her Ares Alpha assault rifle.
In the matrix, Jammer and Madoka attempt and fail several times to hack into the truck wirelessly. They require three marks to send a command to shut down or to stop.
Hueco maneuvers to a better position for Fahrenheit to cast an illusion of Slag climbing across the top of the truck and jumping onto the hood in front of the driver. The driver is unseen, but presumably very scared.
During a tense period waiting for Jammer and Madoka to shut down the truck, Fearless leans out the window and fires a grenade from the underslung launcher at the truck. It scatters off the window and explodes in the median. Everyone in the minivan is shouting at each other.
Engie: No explosions in the van!
Fearless: It didn't explode in your van! Get me back in range for another shot.
Engie: No launching explosives from my van!
The hackers manage to shut down the truck and it pulls over safely against the driver's will. The group's pursuit vehicles surround the truck and Mr. Fahrenheit conjures an illusion of tigers pacing around the van and disco lights and music. The group's psychological warfare wins out and the truck driver surrenders. He is tied to the fan and Engie moves to shoot him. Manifest stops him, reminding him that it was his group that pushed for avoiding casualties. Engie relents, but takes the driver's gun. The groups pull away with the cargo they came for as sirens are heard in the distance.
Post credits. The group travels through several tunnels and back alleys, following detailed instructions from Stella for delivery of the guitar. They come across a heavy steel door at the end of a tight hallway. After a short conversation through the eye slat they present the shined black guitar with a silver autograph.
The door opens to reveal the Japanese man from the introduction scenes, something that has zero meaning to the characters but is an exciting moment for the audience who finally have context for those scenes. The man expresses thanks, and as he takes it inside the camera focuses on what appears to be a small shrine to someone, presumably the woman from the previous scenes. The man turns back to the group and thanks them.
The final shot of the episode is the group turning away from the door and walking dramatically towards the camera, during which they all tear away the tear-away clothing they are all still wearing from the mission.
(None of the players described themselves wearing anything under the tear-away clothing so I imagine some kind of sparkly undergarments, but that's just me, the gamemaster, speaking.)
Edit (2018-04-14): Madoka was evidently wearing a Nuku Nuku cosplay under the Seras Victoria tear-away cosplay.
Post Session Notes
This run was centered a lot around introducing some persistent NPCs that contrasted with the party.
Manifest will be a good hook to keep Madoka engaged with someone outside the party, and Madoka's player has expressed a want to explore some relationship things there. I will do that slowly during downtime on and between runs.
Mr. Fahrenheit has made a friend in Dominic, and I was ecstatic to see that he was the first person Fahrenheit went to when he was unable to project confidence. Dominic is a very grounded character who looks after his friends, so that works as a very good contrast to Fahrenheit's over-the-top behavior most of the time.
I think overall the sessions have been good. I feel that they have been relatively well paced, and I think the players are starting to learn their characters a bit better mechanically. If this campaign was being played at a table I would have made hand-outs for the hackers with short-form versions of the matrix moves with page references, and I could still do that.
There will be downtime before the next run as people need to pay lifestyle costs, going to handle reputation, and I will see about engaging Hueco and Engie in some character developing scenes.
Engie has shown multiple times that he will kill unarmed or fleeing people because they are loose ends. He has also shown that he can go from intense and murderous towards someone to friendly and cooperative as long as they are useful. For being a character than began the series crying in the back of the minivan this is surprising behavior.
There has not been a great deal of time to explore Hueco outside of the context of a shadowrun, so I may have to dig a little to get at it. Maybe a run-in with Slag, a fan of his from his wrestling career in the Barrens, would be a good start.