Casting Shadows

This week’s seed is for Shadowrun. It is incredibly small, but could roam anywhere between amusing and deadly dangerous depending on how you set it up, and the sort of character you use as the target.

The Seed

A Sorcerer of some accomplishment has been devoting himself to obtaining a higher grade of Initiation, and has been tasked by his Circle with meditating as an ordeal designed to prove his readiness. The PC group is hired by a jealous rival to ensure the ordeal is failed.

Planting the Seed

This should be a matter of some fun for you. The rival, unused to ever leaving the rarefied air of academia in her determined pursuit of thaumaturgical advancement, really has no idea about how to recruit “dangerous people.” The characters might enjoy the sense of feeling like they know more than “Mr. Johnson” on this occasion and if they enjoy it enough it may really boost your amusement when they still get in over their heads.

Planting the seed is simple enough, it is a straight hire with a very lucrative fee, and the fringe benefit of enough easily gleaned information to determine the ID of the rival and so gain the ability to blackmail or manipulate a fairly potent Mage of less-than-pure scruples.

This seed will probably work best with a group lacking a Mage, but then again – who doesn’t like to mess with the competition?

The details

The potential initiate, can be as potent as you want/need him to be, and toward the end of his long ordeal of meditation without food for several days, he will be quite testy and almost completely unsure of what is real and what is fantasy. He will not hesitate to play for keeps.

The stipulations of the run are that no permanent harm befalls the target, but under no circumstances is he allowed to complete his ordeal. No payment will be made if they fail to prevent his completion of the period of meditation, and retribution is promised should he be physically harmed.

The location for the ordeal is an empty warehouse in the heart of the sprawl. The Potential Initiate must first make the site safe, and then meditate there for a period of time appropriate to the Grade you need him to be for your Campaign, without interruption, or food.

What’s going on

The Initiate has failed this ordeal before, and in his frustration turned to a former ally, now his Rival, for aid. She enjoyed the feeling of power over him, and now that he has regained his confidence and independence, she wishes to punish him for his base temerity. In a sense, she never really left Juniour High School emotionally, and has only the most basic grasp of social politics imaginable.

The characters are free to do whatever it takes to shake the concentration and determination of the target, but if they shatter his trance and raise his ire, they will find themselves his target instead. Should they retaliate in force, they will find themselves the targets of not just one disoriented sorcerer, but a cabal of bitchy magicians looking to fry runners for all the things that mommy and daddy did wrong.