Serve Cold

A Shadowrun scenario

 

Serve Cold is an attempt to bring the flavour of revenge movies to the gaming table. The pace is fast, the players and their characters are up against the clock, and although the style will be similar to Hong Kong's "heroic bloodshed" movies, the motivations here aren't honour or justice - this is a purely personal vendetta, and for that reason more important for each of the characters involved. Giving money to charity feels good, but stealing money for yourself feels better. But because you can't trust players at a convention to act at all in-character, the motivation for the players is greed - the table that gets the most stylish revenge will walk away with the prizes. This is to prevent them planting a sniper bullet in the guy's brain from 500 metres - they should be diving in there with both pistols blazing, and what they do to satisfy their own senses of payback is left up to their own interpretations of the situation, and the infamous player ingenuity.

The player characters in this scenario are bad ass - and they're going to have to be, to survive the amount of attention they've attracted and fulfill their own personal goals as well. Lone Star are hunting them because of the nauseatingly bad PR the breakout has inflicted upon them. The Yakuza are hunting them under orders from Tatase Goku, the team's one-time boss, who wants them silenced before they can spread the story of his betrayal. The Mafia want to tie them to chairs and cut their balls off because of the assassination job that started this whole mess. With both sides of the law after them, the characters have only each other to turn to.

The GM has a tough job on this one - because of the immense open-endedness (heh, I said "immense open-endedness") of the scenario, there's no way to provide detailed descriptions for everything that could happen in here. The GM is going to have to flesh out what's given here, improvise like crazy, and probably make up a bunch of original stuff. On top of this is the unenviable task of wrestling with the infamous Shadowrun rule system (you might want to bring along a bucket for the players to roll their dice out of), and of keeping the atmosphere right for three gruelling hours.

So, the atmosphere - the anger and hatred that drives the characters towards the ends of John Woo's earlier movies (and remove the noble feelings that are intermingled), the beat-the-clock urgency of Speed, or Die Hard With a Vengeance, and the sheer nastiness of a story where you're rooting for the baddies. These guys are no heroes, they're Michael Caine in Get Carter, they're Mel Gibson in Payback, they're a pack of bastards killing another pack of bastards. And all this has to be done with a Japanese tone. Piece of cake.

By the way, anybody who sees the phrase "Hong Kong style" and thinks of Feng Shui, please report to the nice man with the spatula who'll kindly scoop your brain out and replace it with a packet of crisps. Feng Shui is most definitely a Hollywood style game, and this scenario is not. So don't think that way.

One thing to watch out for - because this is to some extent a competition, try to restrain yourself from giving the players hints. Leave it up to them - it's their game. The rules are whichever table avenges itself upon Tatase the best (as decided in a rather loose manner by a committee of the GMs) before he steps off the plane in Tokyo is the winner. So, a deadline of three days. This time limit is roughly translated into the game world by the fact that just about everybody in the 'Plex is after the team, and they reckon they won't last too long, so they want to get the job done quickly and get out of town. But at the end of the day, those are the boundaries of the rules - within the three days, or no good.

The timing is going to be tight, so the best bet is to run it with the numbers on the character sheets equating to approximate levels of ability in skills and stats, rather than as numbers of dice to roll. Level 4 in a skill is competant enough to do it for a living, and 3 is the human average stat.

Japanese Hong Kong-style cyberpunk Payback with magic. Buckle up, bonehead, 'cause you're goin' for a ride.

 

BACKGROUND STORY

The assassination of Mafia Capo Don James O'Malley outside his Seattle home on New Year's Day, 2057, sparked off an underworld war for control of the Metroplex. As the Mafia families battled one another in a civil war, other organised crime groups lunged to pick up new territory in the confusion, and to keep the situation as favourable for them as possible, for as long as possible. One tactic, as employed by Tatase Goku, was to send his crack team of troubleshooters to assassinate Sofia Villante, niece of Dino Villante. The job was performed skilfully and silently, leaving little evidence.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the law... Lone Star Security Services, with the Mob War spilling over onto the streets, were coming under severe criticism for their seeming inability to keep the ordinary citizens of Seattle safe. This was not the first time they had failed to impress the metroplex government, and speculation was rife that their lucrative Seattle policing contract would be withdrawn. With this prospect looming, some of Lone Star's top Seattle executives formulated a somewhat risky plan. Contacting several of the organised crime organisations, they proposed a deal - they would look the other way from some of the more profitable, less violent syndicate activities, in exchange for some high-profile perpetrators to parade in front of the press.

Tatase Goku, keen to muscle heavily into the BTL market, agreed to this bargain. One day in early 2059, he summoned his troubleshooter team to a secret meeting in a Tacoma warehouse. Suspecting nothing so dishonourable from their master, the team turned up only to find themselves surrounded by a Lone Star SWAT unit. Shot full of toxin darts as their master looked on, they awoke in Lone Star custody, stripped of their equipment and with a long, long prison sentence on its way.

Now the year is 2060. Lone Star milked their "capture" of the Villante Four for all it was worth, and held on to the Seattle contract. The prisoners are being moved by van to a more permanent penal institution owned by a prison company with a sub-contract from Lone Star to provide correctional facilities. The van is well-guarded - but the team have had plenty of time to plan.

The ninja, Masaaki Ishida dislocates his shoulder, allowing him to get the slack necessary to reach the mage-mask on the magician, Kimura Takashi's head. With the mask removed, Takashi is able to stun the two guards in the rear of the van sufficiently with a Manabolt spell to allow Toshiro Uchino, the samurai, to render them inoperational. The team's leader Yosuke Fujiwara grabs the keycard from the belt of one of the guards and undoes his own restraints, throws the card to Takashi and goes to work on the rear doors. Within thirty seconds he has the lock disabled, coinciding with the rest of the team finishing getting their own restraints undone and Ishida popping his shoulder back into its socket. He throws open the rear doors of the van, with one thought burning in his mind... revenge!