Spring is in the Air
And my sinuses, apparently. Ugh, allergies. I don't even know if the sleepiness/spaciness is more due to the allergies or the allergy medicine. That stuff is supposed to be non-drowsy, but I'm never sure I believe such claims.
The Shadowrun game progresses. Sometimes, it's slow, sometimes not quite so bad. Maybe I need to put bells on my character, as his turn was overlooking in the initiative order once and we spent a painful chunk of one session going nowhere because a pose of mine was missed.
Thusfar, lots of dealing with HMHVV-infected people. They're dubbed "vampires" and "loup-garou" and "sasquatches," but I have trouble picturing them as such in fantasy terms. They're vampiric in a sense, but not dead - hence not undead. There's no known cure and the infected tend toward beastial mentally, but it's a retrovirus-style disease. In theory, there should be a way to undo it. So we've been pulling punches to some extent.
We cut down a first group readily enough, then went hunting for the town. We boxed in those were knew about and entered the building. The first one was burned/shot, I believe. The second was knocked out with Narcojet, but got up scant moments later and had to be shot. Ironically, I think the semingly-violence-averse hacker had the highest kill count (albeit indirectly) from the borrowed police drone that mowed down several figures (if it did that well, why didn't the townsfolk do that themselves?). Then we found a girl who wasn't crazed, but was obviously infected. Fun times. She was sealed in a storage bag until she went comatose from lack of air (which vampires apparently do, rather than dying), which probably left a couple characters with mental issues. Another vamp was killed, and captive infected bodies were... taken care of. It was a relatively traumatic encounter all around, I think.
Then we get back to town and the chief there tells us the other location is clear - they checked it out and shamans are healing the essence damage to the area. He also pays in a bag of 210,000 nuyen in certified credsticks and a vintage novel. This is about 200,000 nuyen (and a novel) more than I recall being agreed upon. Now... I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but Shadowrun is the sort of world where you look a gift horse in the mouth or risk not noticing when it grows fangs and buries them in your neck to drink your sweet, sweet blood.
How did he get this sort of month to pay? Well, there's been said to be a dragon in the area with a fondness for old literature. The book seems like a signature of sorts, hinting at the dragon's direct involvement in payment. In fact, the chief could very well be the dragon.
The more bothering question is: why did we get paid so much? However I look at it, the situation fails to me sense. We did something nice, yes. The Sixth World Earth isn't all bad. It's more realistic with some horribly nasty things thrown in. But even in the real world, very few people offer $X for a job, then pay twenty times that. Even if you're rich and have the money, throwing it away like that means you may not be so well off financially after a while. That sort of generosity is mind-boggling, really. Even moreso after having to argue up our initial job price just to have a chance at covering expenses.
As was pointed out, it's also somewhat troubling that there were multiple strains of the virus involved. That, at least, surprises me less when I consider the lab we're going to is in the region and believed to be experimenting on HMHVV. Why experiment with one strain when you can do several (well, scientifically there's some reason, but SR is more about business and money than hard science)? Also, we were told no real locals were lost from the town. And yet there were somewhere around a dozen infected and, perhaps half that many captured as "food." That's rather a lot of people to appear out of nowhere. Even if travellers disappear, that's almost twenty people in a couple weeks, which seems a little high. And if they came from the lab... that still seems a lot of bodies to have escaped/been let out to run around.
I don't know... I'm just confused.
The Shadowrun game progresses. Sometimes, it's slow, sometimes not quite so bad. Maybe I need to put bells on my character, as his turn was overlooking in the initiative order once and we spent a painful chunk of one session going nowhere because a pose of mine was missed.
Thusfar, lots of dealing with HMHVV-infected people. They're dubbed "vampires" and "loup-garou" and "sasquatches," but I have trouble picturing them as such in fantasy terms. They're vampiric in a sense, but not dead - hence not undead. There's no known cure and the infected tend toward beastial mentally, but it's a retrovirus-style disease. In theory, there should be a way to undo it. So we've been pulling punches to some extent.
We cut down a first group readily enough, then went hunting for the town. We boxed in those were knew about and entered the building. The first one was burned/shot, I believe. The second was knocked out with Narcojet, but got up scant moments later and had to be shot. Ironically, I think the semingly-violence-averse hacker had the highest kill count (albeit indirectly) from the borrowed police drone that mowed down several figures (if it did that well, why didn't the townsfolk do that themselves?). Then we found a girl who wasn't crazed, but was obviously infected. Fun times. She was sealed in a storage bag until she went comatose from lack of air (which vampires apparently do, rather than dying), which probably left a couple characters with mental issues. Another vamp was killed, and captive infected bodies were... taken care of. It was a relatively traumatic encounter all around, I think.
Then we get back to town and the chief there tells us the other location is clear - they checked it out and shamans are healing the essence damage to the area. He also pays in a bag of 210,000 nuyen in certified credsticks and a vintage novel. This is about 200,000 nuyen (and a novel) more than I recall being agreed upon. Now... I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but Shadowrun is the sort of world where you look a gift horse in the mouth or risk not noticing when it grows fangs and buries them in your neck to drink your sweet, sweet blood.
How did he get this sort of month to pay? Well, there's been said to be a dragon in the area with a fondness for old literature. The book seems like a signature of sorts, hinting at the dragon's direct involvement in payment. In fact, the chief could very well be the dragon.
The more bothering question is: why did we get paid so much? However I look at it, the situation fails to me sense. We did something nice, yes. The Sixth World Earth isn't all bad. It's more realistic with some horribly nasty things thrown in. But even in the real world, very few people offer $X for a job, then pay twenty times that. Even if you're rich and have the money, throwing it away like that means you may not be so well off financially after a while. That sort of generosity is mind-boggling, really. Even moreso after having to argue up our initial job price just to have a chance at covering expenses.
As was pointed out, it's also somewhat troubling that there were multiple strains of the virus involved. That, at least, surprises me less when I consider the lab we're going to is in the region and believed to be experimenting on HMHVV. Why experiment with one strain when you can do several (well, scientifically there's some reason, but SR is more about business and money than hard science)? Also, we were told no real locals were lost from the town. And yet there were somewhere around a dozen infected and, perhaps half that many captured as "food." That's rather a lot of people to appear out of nowhere. Even if travellers disappear, that's almost twenty people in a couple weeks, which seems a little high. And if they came from the lab... that still seems a lot of bodies to have escaped/been let out to run around.
I don't know... I'm just confused.
It sounds like the GM might be a wee bit confused too ...not that a confused GM really exists... ...since that would be admitting confusion
ReplyDeleteActually, next session should help give you the idea where these other people came from.
ReplyDelete