Next update about our #Shadowrun campaign:
We played SRM 04-00: Back in Business. The first mission of missions season 4, but also clearly a follow-up to Ashes _(CMP 2010-03) from _Sprawl Wilds, which we played last time. The players enjoyed stumbling over the results of their previous adventure, and I didn't have to change a word about the descriptions to make it fit.
There might be spoilers ahead. I'm trying to talk around them and focusing on impressions and experiences, but I have no idea how well of a job I'm doing there. Let me know if you want less or more spoilers to help make sense of this.
It started at the Underworld 93, a club also featuring in a couple of ancient 1st and 2nd edition adventures, with a concert from Maria Mercurial, famous from a classic adventure, so that was all nostalgia for the Shadowrun old-timer who has tons of SR1 and 2 books. A nice atmosphere for meeting their fixer "Bull" MacCallister and get the job, and a lot more fun than the usual anonymous guy on the phone to meet another anonymous guy in an anonymous bar.
I don't usually do voices and accents, but I realised that makes my NPCs boring, so I managed something vaguely resembling a French accent for Laurent Nazaire. The players had already been looking for leads even before they left the club, trying to cobble together events. So Nazaire dropping in their lap with a bit more info was very welcome. They weren't very eager to take him up on his offer for a potential double payment, because that felt unethical to them. Unethical! And the first and firmest to object was the player who normally tends to play somewhat amoral characters, so that was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.
They managed to track down her hotel, found the clue, and, being experienced Earthdawn players, are already developing suspicions about the obsidian shard.
The players were clever to ask a contact they gained in the previous adventure (Ashes) for information and help. That helped me to give them a clue they still needed (their other contacts turned out to be useless, and they lacked all the right knowledge skills), and it gives me a better excuse to give them the guide they need later than the mission itself provides me. Instead of stumbling upon Pip the Ork kid, he's now going to be sent by their contact, which is entirely thematic for her, since she also sent kids their way in Ashes.
But the real highlight for me was this:
Even more than their meetings with MacCallister and Nazaire, I was looking forward to their encounter with Tosh Athack. I've read from several people how they liked Tosh and his up and down relationship with the players over the course of quite a lot of adventures, and I certainly see the appeal here: a slightly crooked cop who doesn't like shadowrunners but deals with them anyway in order to get a job done. 2 of the 3 PCs did manage to escape when Knight Errant showed up, one by immediately sprinting out past his enemies, accepting that he'd get hit; the other by immediately casting invisibility. Of course shadowrunners don't want to deal with the cops; I cant blame them. The adventure tells me to try to prevent them from escaping, but I realised I only really needed one PC to deal with them. That PC (the decker) was really nervous and trying to bluff his way through by denying everything, meaningwhile I played Tosh Athack as extremely confident, taking his time, a bit more sarcastic than I'd originally intended, but that worked perfectly. Referred to the other two PCs as Flash and the Invisible Man. I lowered the pitch of my voice for him. It all worked perfectly, and the PCs turned into timid school children before the big troll. They're not happy to be working for Knight Errant, but double pay is nice.
Next time we'll pick up after that meeting. This was a nice place to stop.
Finally, a conversion issue: The final fight (which we didn't get to) would feature a couple of Ares Sentinel 'R' drones. The adventure of course had only the SR4 stats, and we're playing SR5. No problem, I've got Rigger 5, but that didn't have the stats. Neither did Core. The Serrated Edge adventure did (I remembered), but looking at those stats, they were rather insane: Body 10 and Armor 12, while the biggest drone in Core had Body 6. And then several of these. The SR4 stats had Body 2 and armor 6. Stats may not translate perfectly between editions, but this really didn't seem right. I decided to use the Aztechnology Crawler stats instead. But that's for next time.
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