Casting Shadows

This Saturday Seed is being planted for Shadowrun of whatever edition chromes your jack.

My Saturday Seeds also reappear on Ancient Scroll on random Saturdays~

The seed

The seed is built around the horror and mental violence of red tape and greed.

Planting the seed

The seed can be planted most easily for an established group that has made a few corporate enemies, alienated some useful allies in the shadows, left a few too many bodies, and can appreciate a chance to clean up some past mistakes with an agreement to commit some more in the future.

The Details

A local fixer who already has reasons not to like the crew contacts them with a chance for a lucrative, but challenging job. He needs a crew to take it quickly and if the runners accept it no questions asked, he will forgive and forget past slights. If he has to strong-arm them into it, or has to negotiate or discuss the fee structure, he will still put them up for the gig, but won’t give them any friendly advice or forgive those slights we just mentioned. 

All he wants to share about the job is that there is a meeting at a local hot spot with good security where Ms. Johnson will provide a list of locations for the runners to check and a list of data to be retrieved from those locations. Resistance is expected to be stealthy and evasive rather than in-your-face, but the contract does acknowledge the relative danger of the area in and around those locations, focusing mainly on combat skills and medical attention.

He can be persuaded to add that it is much more toward capture and interrogation than infiltration and data retrieval, if pressed. Ms. Johnson wants the runners to get intel on the people that they find.

The meeting itself, if the runners bite, is simple. Ms. Johnson is on time, prepared, and hides her disdain well. She has maps, trideo of individuals and sites, and a very clear protocol for action: She wants the runners to be process servers more than anything else.

Her corporation has recently taken on aspects of some municipal security contracts and that includes dealing with squatters and unregistered inhabitants of the community. In short, she is sending the runners out to ID, and then register everyone living in the cracks of society, and for a fun bonus, providing them with subpoenas for some of the more dangerous felons lurking in the shadows.

Pay and benefits are great. The implication is that as with the fixer, all will be forgiven if the runners do this job well.

What’s going on

This is a win-win for Ms. Johnson no matter what happens. If the group gets wise to her scheme and doesn’t follow through, she can ruin their reputation for non-completion, and set the group up to take a fall anyway. If the group succeeds, even partially, there is profit to be made, and again she can ensure that the right violent people know of their involvement. If they call for medical assistance, all lines can be busy; and if they are greased by a troubled squatter then Christmas just came early. 

Why is she doing this? Tie it into an early success of the group where despite their lack of experience and skill they pulled off a good run. Old vendettas burn the hottest, don’t they?

Enjoy~