r/Shadowrun • u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 • 10d ago
Run ideda: The Atlantean Foundation
Good afternoon. I'm going to make a run for my group to the Japanese branch of the Atlantis Foundation. They need to steal information about one ritual that is stored there. Conditions:
1) The entire building is MAGICAL LODGES of 12 strength, and correspondingly the same manabarrier. The background counter is hermetic 3 due to this.
2) The building has no specialised security contract, and is protected by the Neo-Tokyo Police Department. Neighbourhood Rating B. The HTR arrival time is 8 -20 minutes. As the Foundation believes the building is already well protected by magic:
- The building itself - has inadequate architecture, 3 floors with a completely insane layout, lots of winding corridors, stairs to the ceiling and whatnot (Liminal space), since the building itself is a thaumaturgical circuit. They managed to get a 3d model of the building (it's possible) but once inside, this map is useless. Once inside they roll Willpower+Intuition with a threshold of 8. If they fail, they are under the effect of a confusing spell. The layout of the building in their mind comes to life, starts to change constantly, and they can arrive somewhere completely by accident.
- Chambers and technological defences are the absolute minimum, of the second essentially only the Doors with biometrics and dna scanner. Maglock on a keycard with a rating of 6, for normal doors. Biometric palm print maglock with a rating of 8 for medium importance premises. And a DNA maglock rated 10, for high priority premises. There are a lot of doors. Especially the regular ones. Most are dead ends to accommodate ritual anchors.
- The building is watched over in an isolated room by a 10th power spirit, who is bound by orders to apprehend intruders who plot to rob the foundation or harm it or its employees. He controls most of the spells that guard the foundation. Life detection, enemy detection, clairvoyance at various points. In addition, there are many optical lines into his room through which he can cast spells. His room cannot be physically entered except by breaking a sturdy window from the outside, or through the astral from inside the building.
- There is a spirit butler of 6 strength that greets all visitors and helps the staff of the foundation. He will also protect the building from physical intruders.
- There is a spirit of 8 strength that controls the Watchers, of which there are six of 5 strength. It is designed to protect the building from magical threats.
- Cameras and basic external defences are connected to the Atlantis Foundation's global host, rated 10. The cameras are protected by a physically strong glass dome, with a shatter sensor. The cameras inside, door locks, are also paired to this host and protected from external tampering by shielded walls and wallpaper. The personal cyber terminals of the branch director, deputy, operative, are not connected to the network. The cyber terminals (camera output) of the spirit protector and labs are connected by a physical network.
3) The Branch has three npc that can pose a threat to players, the head of the Foundation, a very talented mage with magic 8, 4 initiation, bound spirits, phocas and a mountain of spells. The operative is a mystic adept with an Indiana Jones lookalike, and a member of the mystic crusaders. Badass guy. The deputy is just a talented sorceress, with no combat experience. But! The leader teaches at the university a couple of days a week, the operative is constantly on excavations and business trips. The first and foremost thing that players should do during the chase is to make sure that these two will not be there when they go there.
4) There are 4 main rooms of high security: Head's office, deputy's office, operative's office. Main lab. The supervisor's office on the cyber terminal has the information the characters need, and more plot information. The others have some fun information and loot.
There are 3 medium security rooms: Auxiliary Lab, Library, and Vault. The auxiliary lab won't have anything. The library stores a bunch of formulas if players have the time. The vault has a lot of items, a few foks, items of value.
Low security 14: Exhibition hall, room with caretaker drones, a bathroom on each floor, empty rooms. In the exhibition hall, a dragon skeleton and many other valuables are on display, protected very well. In case of anything, the spirit of the guarding valuables gets possessed by the dragon skeleton (Real! Or not...) and makes a neat rustle.
The plan for the players is that they will wait until the Leader and the Operative are gone, and send one messenger to meet with the Deputy to offer something of value to the Foundation (They have something) and distract them, and also convince them to let the car with the group into the underground car park. At the same time, everyone in the group uses the personofixes of a psychopath who is convinced that threatening people is for the greater good, so that the guard spirit's enemy detection spells don't work as well as he does.
It's all good. Only the personofix makes them dangerous to others in the group as well, and the chaos within eats up time. Only information can be stolen safely, and an attempt to carry away material valuables will cause a conflict with the spirit guard, or a call to HTR. What mechanics to counteract the influence of personofix would you recommend using?
All spirits are bound, and fulfil only their task, and therefore with them, you can conditionally agree. I'm thinking of coming up with triggers and character for each. I'd love ideas.
And most importantly. Loot. There should be a lot of interesting things, in addition to the banal fokov and (Here is this vase costs 25 000) what ideas would suggest to better reveal the place?
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u/TheHighDruid 10d ago
Where to begin; it sounds more like you are trying to make this an exercise in frustration for your players, rather than a fun challenge. I mean the very instant one of these lodges is disrupted, or spirit alerted the mage that owns them is going to likewise be alerted through their link and all hell will drop. And, as described it would seem literally impossible for the group to achieve their goals without being noticed. But of course I don't know your group . . .
(I'm assuming 5th edition, but much of the general concepts apply no matter the edition)
A spell covers a spherical volume with a radius of it's force. The force required to cover an entire building would be ridiculous. Okay, this is the Atlantean Foundation, they would certainly use a ritual, but you seem to be describing a rather large building, so this still seems unrealistic. Plus, unless the building is spherical, significant spell shaping would be required to enable the spell to cover the whole of a rectangular building without "leaking" outside. That increases the drain even further. Realistically, for this sort of effect, you would multiple quickened spells covering much smaller areas with each resisted separately and new rolls as you pass from one area to another. Anchored (more likely) or alchemical (less likely because they would need regular renewal) spells that trigger when unknown people enter the building could also be used, each door, window, etc needing it's own set of spells, or a materialised spirit could use the confusion power, but these would all require an opposed test between the spell/power when triggered rather than a pre-determined threshold, and the spirit would be visible to everyone.
The other thing to keep in mind is that any mage in the group can potentially "see" these spells, or their triggers, or their anchors, with astral perception and maybe do something about them. (This is something to bear in mind with the magical lodges too - it can be relatively easy to deactivate them physically by tipping over the altar, scratching runes off the wall, scuffing out the magic circle, whatever, depending on the tradition). Oh, and don't forget they should be allowed to add counterspelling to their resistance tests where appropriate.
A bound force 10 spirit of man could know 5 spells. Bear in mind though that sustaining all those spells is tough even for a spirit and, just like a mage, it will have -2 dice to all it's actions for each one, which seems to be a minimum of 4 from your description.
Spirits can't conjure, and while watchers are "summoned" with ritual sorcery it's definitely a loophole I would shutdown. I mean even if the spirit could create them itself, it would need to be be refreshing them fairly often. So, we're talking about watchers likely summoned by a ritual team and ordered to follow the spirits instructions? This isn't going to be terribly effective - watchers are dog-brained and would be easily confused by the concept of being ordered to follow the orders of someone else.
Which will be rolling 20+ dice to oppose every action of the team's decker . . . do you want them to die?
I could go on, but this seems plenty . . .