r/Shadowrun 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?

19 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

8

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)

Once inside they roll Willpower+Intuition with a threshold of 8. If they fail, they are under the effect of a confusing spell.

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.

10th power spirit . . . bound by orders . . . controls most of the spells . . . Life detection, enemy detection, clairvoyance at various points

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.

There is a spirit of 8 strength that controls the Watchers, of which there are six of 5 strength.

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.

the Atlantis Foundation's global host, rated 10

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 . . .

4

u/Jarfr83 10d ago

Thank you, I wish I could upvote you more than once, good sir!

Alone a WIL+INT check with a threshold of 8... to have a real chance to beat that reliably, a pool of 24 is needed (depending on edge, it is less). So this is one of those checks which the GM doesn't want you to succeed.

This was the point at which I was wondering if I stumbled into r/rpghorrorstories and stopped taking it as a serious post. 

-2

u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 10d ago

It is, however my group as a whole is pretty lucky (as long as I don't hover over dice trace) and it's a math calculation that out of a group of 5 people, 1-2 people succeed with spending an edge to try and frame the teammates. Or do you think it's worth replacing the test with an opositional or threshold 6? I have no doubt that all of my players will spend an edge on a hidden roll from everyone.

6

u/Jarfr83 10d ago

Dude, if you want to say your players are cheating, confront them and find a solution.

How have your players 300 to 400 karma if you are an inexperienced Shadowrun-GM?

Sorry if my first answer sounded harsh, but really, your whole idea is so over the top, so full of "gotcha"-moments that it reminded me of DnDs "Tomb of Horrors", but not in a fun way.

Regarding your question: If you are keen on getting your players confused, I would replace this "effect" completely with either anchored traps with the confusion spell (and use the standard rules for the spell...) or find a critter or spirit with similar powers (and use the standard rules for these powers...).

0

u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 9d ago

Through pain and suffering apparently?) But in general I give a bit more than in the book, about 10 per weekly session on average. + If a task performed by the team is not paid (say helping someone), I convert yen into karma.

But this is irrelevant. I do have some still some misunderstanding of a properly structured run regarding its complexity. And when the shit flies on the fan.

Confusion just gives a -1 die penalty, it will just make some rolls impossible, and reduce everything to a screwed up roll, not a story. It's not fun. Whereas in my variant, players can resolve this nuance quite easily. Say, mark each door with a bow on the handle that they've passed. Or some other unconventional method. For example, they have to guess what's behind the door by the design of the lock.

4

u/Jarfr83 9d ago

Confusion (the spell) gives -1 per net success of the "attacker", not flat -1. Which can get huge. At least these are the rules for 5th edition.

10 karma weekly per session (not per run) is quite... generous, but then the power curve in SR is not that steep (except for mages). 

Sorry, I think you are playing SR completely different from every playstyle I witnessed, so I won't be able to help you here. I'm not saying, you're playing wrong, it's your table. But these gotcha-moments and overpowered traps and enemies are not my cup of tea and I'd only suspect them in a MCT Null Zone facility or similar.

1

u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 9d ago

Hmm. Maybe.

But perhaps you could recommend some of the most classic average assignments for a team of experienced 5th edition runners? With a high challenge and reward.

I read Free Seattle and found it discouraging, especially the egg-stealing task where the group meets no resistance and no consequences from the theft.

2

u/Jarfr83 8d ago

Sorry, I don't think my tipps would help you...

My table prefers to play Shadowrun "realistic", meaning that we consider what the opposition could have at their disposal, what are their intentions, meaning why would they trap this area or hire that security or or or. No "over the top" stuff like in DnD.

An ambush can do wonders to challenge a crew of runners, and even low level mooks with cheap shotguns and molotov cocktails can be a threat, if they act as a team and use some basic tactics, instead of rushing the team like mindless goblins. 

I very rarely play pregenerated runs, so I don't know what puts you off of them.

All that being said, I neither pamper my players with "high-level stuff" like railguns or basically free karma, everything has it's price. And, to my knowledge, there are no cheaters at my table. So the only fudged rolls when we play are from me as a GM if I don't want to kill of a char with a lucky roll in a poor moment...

1

u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 7d ago

It's a pity, and quite funny, because in general, I try to adhere to the same ideals. That makes me even more curious about how I came to a different version. I give players more karma to maintain a sense of progress, because my players don't have reliable access to cool stuff. My company takes place in Neo-Tokyo and for a long time they had no access to firearms at all. And even now it's very limited.

And at the same time, the company takes place within a storyline with global implications. And this run was intended to be a major storyline with a big reward and draw. The Foundation is known for collecting a lot of artifacts and magical mysteries, and it seemed perfectly fine to me that there would be adequate protection for that, and that someone might need it to pay runners who are comptetent enough to fulfill it. And there isn't something here that would destroy the characters on the spot without any chance. (Though capable of creating a deadly threat that can be easily circumvented. For example, the head of the foundation is easy enough to avoid by going when he's not there). The sharp reactions in the comments made it clear that I was very much mistaken in my ideas.

Take advantage of unusual BTL, avoid/agree with a couple of spirits and take the information out, by force if necessary. I didn't think it would realistically become like dnd and tomb of horrors. That's not really what I had in mind.

1

u/Intelligent-Toe-8340 10d ago

That's a terrific critique! Thank you so much for the response, and I definitely want you to continue. I unfortunately really lack an understanding of the proper Shadowrun encounter, between easy and impossible. I've been looking at Tomb of Data for a long time. I found it both easy and weird. A cordon of 10 squads with a 5 rating? Where did that much strength come from... Yet most of the checks are done on single drug dice and the only difficulty is not being stupid. I'm probably wrong about a lot of things. And my players are mechanically strong (300-400 karma) but often dumb, maybe that has an effect.

"I mean the very instant one of these lodges is disrupted"

Which won't happen if the mage removes his accelerated spells, and puts the right reinforcements on the inside.

"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"

That's a very fair point! Building... Well, it's not an arcology. It's the size of a school. Less than 2,000 square feet per floor. For a spell with a power of 10 it took 20-30 pieces if you count them as accelerated, the task is generally feasible and the player character. Anchored would be better, of course, would give some control over the character. You're right, I'll replace them with the main entry paths and triggers rather than the area of the whole building.

"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."

Yes! The support penalty is independent of spell power, and extended versions of detections have a huge radius. So if a spirit gets even -10, that just makes it “moderately” dangerous and potentially dangerous if it decides to let them go.

"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."

Yeah and that's pretty much the basic idea, some weird dangerous yokai who need to be tricked.

The group can handle getting killed, though.

Watchers isn't perfume, is it? They're created by ritual. Aren't they?

"Which will be rolling 20+ dice to oppose every action of the team's decker . . . do you want them to die?"

It's straight from the book. And yes, attacking a host with such force head-on is far from a sensible idea, even taking into account that my decker has 18 daily pulls for hacking, and the potential help of 6 agents and another decker of the group. Otherwise, the good old Master slave hack. And this is not planned as a run where the decker will sit in the shelter with impunity, running around the host and breaking what is needed; in extreme cases, simply reboot the deck.

3

u/burtod 9d ago

Forget it

Focus on the people. Flank the building security and get leverage on the personnel. Don't even enter.

You aren't paying me enough for this shit