Campaign Ideas Primary to the game is getting the players to understand that they are worth about 3cents more than squat. Make sure they know that NPCs they found beneath their attention in previous games are now lording over them. They lack organization and equipment, let alone the skills and contacts of the NPCs. Make them struggle to get any money, and therefore struggle to get transportation, etc. Making things that you used to gloss over hard to accomplish will help keep your PCs in line. And don't let them hoard money either. Any time that money seems to be pilling up in some character's account (anything over a few hundred euro), introduce a few new expenses - steal their body armor, or fudge a hit location roll onto the PC's firearm, or damage some vital piece of electronics by making them jump into a sewer or something. Keep em struggling and desperate. Enemies are boring - you can predict what they'll do (ie: screw you over). Friends and acquaintances on the other hand are unpredictable and necessary. A party with no cash needs alternate resources, and the best of these are friends and contacts. But each person has their own agenda, which the players may not enjoy, especially if it involves them in some way. This makes friends a lot more dangerous to the PCs than the enemies, not to mention a lot more fun. What every low end group hopes for is a patron or at least a regular source of work. To combine the above concept with this, we've stuck our players in a Squat with a collection of other "interesting" scumpunks. One of the ex-squatters who no longer lives here is Oliver (from Dark Metropolis) - a small time fixer who works with Ghandi The Toad and The Imp of the Perverse. Through him the players will get the occasional gig working for Ghandi, although Oliver will never mention who the patron is. The objective of these runs will be to disrupt the activities of Night City's biggest underground armament dealer, Carlucci, so that Ghandi can claim almost exclusive control of the armament business in the region. At first this war is to start off quiet, as Ghandi is not actually willing to go to war, but just wants to inconvenience Carlucci. Hits and operations will be staged against Carlucci's facemen - people whom the players will have heard of as being big-time in comparisson to them (but who are really just facemen). The first target will be Jenny Woo's operations (although not Jenny Woo herself, she'd eat the players alive and they know it). (two paragraphs have been cut here so the players won't read how the campaign will end, as I've detailed every twisted little plot...) Game Sessions Our first game was an attempt to disrupt a data shipment being run by Jenny Woo. Because the shipment involved OA, the players couldn't just walk into the data-drop and waste everyone. Instead they had to find out where the non-volatile media was coming from, and then intercept it en-route to the data-drop. If they tagged the non-volatile media any sooner then Jenny Woo would get new media delivered in time for the drop and would have it more secured, and if they waited too long they would find themselves at the actual data-dump with a dozen corp enforcers from OA here to pick up the data from Jenny. The players checked around and found that the best form of memory for this kind of job would be the Whitegate DataCache (Chrome 4 pg 47). Of the few shops in town that stock said devices, none had any in stock, but when the players made enqiries about buying some non-volatile memory, a store employee indicated that they would have four 100MU units in for a customer order in two days. Since the players knew that the data dump was just under 400MU this was obviously the place. Two days later the players observed from the rooftop as the pickup was made. One player placed a tracer on the vehicle making the pickup and it was followed to the illegal casino/brothel that Jenny Woo used as her headquarters. Once there the units were moved upstairs by freight elevator (which the players were unaware of) and stored in Jenny Woo's personal room, effectively out of the player's reach. The driver of the pickup vehicle then left the casino on his motorcycle and went home. The players did successfully intercept the shipment, and made off with a case of non-volatile memory (100MU). In an attempt to sell off the case they made contact with Pagan, a big-time data-broker. He needed the case delivered to a courier in the free city of Newark (ex-New Jersey). We then segued into a messed up version of the hotel scene in the movie version of Johnny Mnemonic with a Tong Squad out to get the data and holding the netrunner courier who is in constant contact with the players via cell-phone and feeding them the disinformation given by the Tong Squad. When the team left Newark they vowed never to return. The next night Oliver is back, this time it's not another job for Ghandi, it's because they successfully moved the data for Pagan and another big mover and shaker wants data-couriers. This segued into an almost exact re-make of the scenario entitled "a macguffin named agrippa" from Mockery's site. Once the party has their hands on the original agrippa as well as having a copy of the data being made for them by the Brainiacs, they made contact with the Russian Mafiya to sell them the original. But it never rains... As soon as they make contact with the Mafiya, Oliver tells them to make contact with Ghandi the Toad again for another job. This time they are to steal a shipment of explosives arriving at the Mustang Arms company in the Marina District in one weeks time and then drive it to the building used as Jenny Woo's headquarters to blow it up. The players then ship their sorry asses off to New York to make the swap with the Mafiya. They first meet one Mafiya go-between on the torch of the Statue of Liberty (a la Harry Canyon) who checks to make sure the Agrippa contains the proper amount of data to be a copy of the transmission they want. When everything checks out he tells them the exchange will be the next day at noon. He then hands them a reservation at a five-star hotel where it will occur. Once at the hotel the players do what players are wont to do when living in what seems to be a free room, ordering room service, laundry service and even fresh clothes. The meet goes as planned the next day. The players are called on the phone in their penthouse suite and told that the meeting will occur in the second-floor lobby at a data-table. Once there, they meet the Mafiya sitting around a marble table with a data-jack on each side. They sit and eat shrimp cocktails and real caviar. Then they make the data dump from the Agrippa into the table which then downloads the data to the Mafiya's laptop. While the data transfers from the agrippa to the table the table also initiates a credit transfer from the Mafiya leader's credstick. Once the transaction is complete, the credit transfer is credited to the character's account AT THE HOTEL, and the Mafiya even throw in a small tip (5000eb - originally meant to help cover the cost of the penthouse suite at 6,000eb a night). So to get the money, the characters have to go talk to the manager of the hotel and settle their accounts. Their total bill (including the lunch with the Mafiya of course) came out to over 16,000eb for a 20 hour stay. Their take-home pay was obviously severely dented (since the total transfer from the Mafiya was just over 20,000eb) and the players move on back to Night City, where they begin to plot the theft of the explosives. More to follow.