The Big Local Boss
A Simple Shadowrun For Beginning Players

General Description

This game conveniently takes place in Seattle.  The characters are hired by a nervous, unimposing bureaucratic functionary to kill his oppressive, mean boss at work.  Unfortunately, there is no Matrix component, because I don't own a copy of the third edition rules, and do not know enough about the Matrix system to write anything interesting about it. If you're the GM, and you really want a Matrix part, feel free to add it; with this adventure, it's pretty easy to slip in a little Matrix anywhere. If you're a player, don't read any further, because then this adventure won't be as much fun.  You might be thinking something like, "Heh heh heh! I'll know what all the secrets are and I'll be familiar with all the security, and then I'll do *really* well on this mission!".  But then to you I say, "You moron!  You just ruined the experience for yourself!  Knowing exactly what's supposed to happen at all times detracts from the experience more than I can say!  It's like lying about what numbers came up when you roll your dice...if you're going to cheat like that, what's the point in playing a game with rules?  You may as well go get the Genesis version of Shadowrun, and use the Save State function so much that you never loose a gunfight, or you never fail to hack a system.  At least then you won't ruin the experience for everyone you're playing with!"

GM's description of what's going to happen

Sonny Wanadoo is a hard working man.  He puts on his cheap, repeatedly drycleaned, decade old suit every day, and shows up early to work at the local Diminuous (a small business with several branches in Seattle, which hires itself out to bigger corporations; Diminuous specializes in filling out routine legal forms for a modest fee, and can handle enough documents to take a little bit of the strain off of a large corporate office) corporate office.  Every day for lunch, he eats a tired nutrisoy sandwich his wife Beth made for him.  He sits all day in his cramped cubicle, doing his best to fill out forms for the company.  But every day, his life is made difficult by his overweight, powertripping boss, Sandra Bellinda.  Bellinda yells at him, and gives him work to do which is due the next day which she should have given him a week ago.  She threatens to have him fired for insubordination whenever he complains to her.  And when she, through her mismanagement, creates a problem in terms of work that has been neglected which must be accomplished in three days now, she always throws the burden of finishing the work on Sonny and his co-workers.

Sonny is a mild-mannered, bespectacled man who looks like Woody Allen with a small pot belly.  He's aged a lot working in the office, and he, along with a few of his co-workers, have been thinking for years that enough is enough.  For many years, they've fantasized about killing Bellinda; about putting arsenic in her coffee, about pulling a Walther Palm Pistol on her, about dressing up as a classical samurai and running her through with Uncle Yashirobe's katana.  And yet, there is security in the office.  There are guards and cameras.  And there is Lone Star, a phone call away.  People like Wanadoo and his coworkers just aren't built for taking action into their hands, it seems.

One day, during their lunch break, Sonny and his friends at work were watching some Trid on a small, portable unit that the secretary, Wanda, brought along for everyone.  They were watching a noontime rerun of "The Shadows Of The Night," an overdone 30 minute show about a team of shadowrunners.  And then, with an anxious glance to his left and his right, Sonny said, "You know what we really, really, really should do?  Let's hire some shadowrunners to kill that meanie Bellinda!"  At first everyone thought he was kidding, but when he persisted, everyone slowly considered.  After a few minutes, everyone was thinking the same thing, "What a good idea!"

It turned out that Ricky the janitor, an ork who came from a very bad part of town, had an uncle who was a BTL dealer.  And this uncle of his once mentioned how he was going to get a Warhawk pistol from a fixer that a friend of his knew.....maybe his uncle would be able to hook them up with a fixer, who could hook them up with a team!

After about two years of saving money to pay for whatever the runners might ask, Sonny and his friends were ready...

Act 1: The Call

(The following text should be read to someone who has a fixer contact.)

The telecom rings.  And rings.  And rings.  You think you should pick it up; after all, it could be a job, and it's hard enough getting jobs when you don't have a big reputation yet.

"Hoi, this is [fixer's name].  I think I got a job for you, but it sounded like a bit of a kittycat run.  Something about shooting a fat lady.  I dunno what the pay is, tho.  Are you interested?"

[At this point, the GM, role playing the fixer, should try to answer whatever initial questions the character has.  The fixer, however, doesn't know much more than he's already said.  The offer itself came from a BTL dealer, who in turn passed the offer on from someone else.  He may also reveal that from what he heard, the person who put out the job offer wasn't a regular in shadow circles.]

"Well, the guy said the meet would occur next week on Friday at 6:00 PM at some roach-infested place called Barflees's.  You game?"

[If the characters say yes, good.  If they say no, the fixer may try to persuade them a bit, since he expects he will get at least a small commission off of this one.  Hopefully the characters agree.]

"Okay, the addy of Barflees's is 209 Kuso Avenue.  Take yer team there when you meet.  Good luck, and watch yer back.  I don't wanna loose a shadow team, chummer.  Them's can be hard to come by."

Act II: The Meet

(Read the following description of Barflees's, then go on to Wanadoo's spiel.  The speech is only a guideline; if any of the characters interrupt or ask questions, feel free to make the conversation up as you go along. Just look over the speech now to see the manner in which Wanadoo would talk, so that you can role play him convincingly.)

Approaching Barflees's from outside, you get the distinct impression of an opened can half-filled with rotten soy which has been flung onto some concrete and left to molder.  The color of the outside walls are a rust grey, and the windows are covered with some kind of greyish dust to the point that they are nearly opaque.  The diminutive building itself is squeezed between two tall, dark, steel warehouses which seem to make Barflees all the more small and rotted.  As you walk up to the metal front door, it slides open automatically, the rusted slab of steel screeching like a banshee against whatever it's sliding on.  The oily, smoggy sent of the damp and cold Seattle evening is driven from your nostrils as they are raped by the acrid fog of cheap booze, sweaty armpits, charred synthtobacco and spoiled food coming from within the bar.  You wonder whether or not your Johnson is trying to make the worst impression he possibly could on you.

Inside the bar, you are reminded not so much of a half-rotted discarded can of tasteless food, but rather of an unflushable urinal in which someone has vomited a very runny half-digested mixture of synthbeer, synthvodka, and buffalo wings.  There is smoke pouring from some crowded tables and from the kitchen; secondhand nicotine stick residue and thick, industrial strength grease which has been seconded into use as cooking oil coats the inside of your nostrils.  You look back and forth among the patrons, looking for anyone who looks remotely like a Johnson.  However, everyone seems to be a scrawny human street punk, an ork in a thick, leather biker jacket, or a troll staring blankly into a cloudy shot glass.  Maybe the Johnson canceled the meet?

However, just before you turn to leave, you see him.  He was so small you almost didn't notice him.  He's sitting way in the back, hidden behind layers of cigarette smog.  He's wearing what looks like a twelve year old blue suit which, in spite of careful folding and regular cleaning, has seen better days.  He's thin of build, and is glancing about nervously.  Thick spectacles sit upon his nose.  He reminds you of the late twentieth century comedian Woody Allen, except the guy here is much funnier to watch as he seems to inch closer to his bodyguard with every passing minute.

You begin to walk over to him.  As you gradually approach, you look at his bodyguard.  His body guard is an ork with a black leather jacket and a backpack sitting next to him.  When he folds his arms on the greasy table, you see the butt of a large pistol sticking out from the left sleeve of his acket.  He notices you, sees you approaching, and nods at you.

You are only one foot away from the table, however, when the man in the suit, who has been looking off to the side and whispering something repeatedly, starts and spins his face at you.  He begins to talk in a tone which sounds confident, yet which also sounds extremely practiced. "Welcome, my friends.  I hear that you people are experts in eliminating certain..."

At this point, the man stops talking for an instant, and looks at a corner of the table.  Following his gaze, you see that he is looking at a pile of very dirty paper napkins, which look like they have been used to wipe the table.  You see a bead of sweat form on his forehead as he bats the napkins onto the floor.  Then he continues talking, sounding less sure of himself. 
"Um, I hear that you people are experts in eliminating certain difficulties. I have a job which requires a certain amount of subtlety, and I will need a group of professionals to....to....I will need a group of professionals...to...as I was saying, it's very subtle really, the situation, and you....um....FRAG IT!"

The ork bodyguard seems barely able to contain his laughter as he watches the Johnson's glasses steam up out of the corner of his eye.  The bodyguard speaks.

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Johnson here seems to have forgotten the words to the speech I told him not to prepare.  Basically, he needs you to ice someone for him."

Mr. Johnson swallows before continuing, "Uh, yeah.  I need someone... someone.... passed away."  He gulps again when he realizes how stupid he just sounded.  Then he continues, "I can pay your team three thousand nuyen.  Could you do it for that?"

[At this point, the GM must negotiate with the players in the role of Wanadoo.  3,000 nuyen is pretty much all of the money that he and his office staff have saved up, so he won't go any higher very easily.  If pressed, however, he will figure he can afford to pay up to 500 more nuyen, at the very desperate most.]

[When an agreement has been reached, read the following.]

Mr. Johnson says, "Okay, so you're gonna do it?  Thanks so, so, so much! The person's name is Sandra Bellinda.  She's a manager at the Diminuous offices on 449 Elegia street.  The whole building is owned by Diminuous, but it's a small building with only three floors; it used to be a big warehouse.   Um, you probably want to know what her routines are, so I'll tell you."

"She arrives each weekday at seven in the morning by car, and stays until five each evening.  Sometimes she goes out for lunch at twelve, and sometimes she orders a pizza or two in.  Er, I don't know where she lives or what she does on the weekend, but she always shows up for work like clockwork, so maybe you should get her then.  She's real big and fat, and she's got the ugliest thin long blond hair.  She looks like...like a bloated bullfrog in a suit!  And she smells like...like a combat biker's armpit! Please...do what you can to her."

[Bellinda looks a lot like Linda Tripp: real fat, big, nasty features, and an ugly expression all the time.  Just use this sort of description whenever the PCs see her.]

"Oh, and if you need to call me, here is my phone number.  Good luck, chummers!"  He hands you a small slip of paper with a number written on it.

You shake hands and are about to get up, when the bodyguard speaks up.  "By the way, chummers; do any of you have a use for some BTL?  I got some here in my bag, at my special prices....!"

[If the players want to buy BTL chips, let them.  This is just thrown in for flavor, but what the heck.  It's their money, even if they choose to waste it.  Don't let the chips cost more than 100, just in case any PC mistakenly thinks that BTL chips have a use in the game, or doesn't know what they are.]

[Before the characters leave Barflee's, Mr. Johnson comes running up behind them.]

"Drek, I almost forgot to give you this!"  He hands you two things; one is a holopix of your target, and the other is a sheet of white paper with a map hand-drawn in pen on it.  It is labelled, "General Floor Plan of Each Floor at 449 Elegia Street."

"Uh, thanks guys; it's good to know that this slitch is gonna get a Monday half as bad as the Mondays she's given me.  I'll be seeing you.  Just call if you need anything."

Act III: The Preparation

If the characters try to call Wanadoo, they will get an answering machine. It will say cheerfully in Mr. Johnson's voice, "You have reached the home of Beth and Sonny Wanadoo.  Please leave a message after the beep."  This is a  joke to make the players laugh at their Johnson's incompetence.  If they try to blackmail him, however, since they know his real name, they will find it very unprofitable since Wanadoo is not a wealthy man.  Wanadoo will return their call in several hours if the characters remembered to leave their phone number on his answering machine.  If you as the GM are feeling particularly mischievous, you might have Wanadoo, once he has a phone number, call direct from time to time in the future when the characters have become skillful and notorious shadowrunners, asking them to do really lame jobs like dig up dirt on a surly waitress at a small café somewhere.  This
should only happen occasionally, because Wanadoo can only dig up 3,000 nuyen once every few years.

When the characters get back to their hideout or whatever, they will have time to look at the map, as Monday is still two days away.  The map is only of one floor, but the entire three floor loft has the same layout for each floor.  The building is in a cheap but not unsafe area of town; it will take Lone Star will take some time to respond to any calls from this part of town because the people who live there aren't very rich, and many are trolls and orks. Therefore they don't count as much in the eyes of the Star.

The floor plan is as follows: Each floor of the warehouse is 50 meters by 50 meters.  On the ground floor, the main entrance is on the north side of the wall in the middle, and there is a service entrance directly opposite it on the south wall.  Along each wall of the building are cubicles which are three meters by three meters.  (The map does not mention it, but on each floor one of the cubicles has been converted to a bathroom.) Ten meters from the middle of the north wall is a single two meter by two meter elevator.  (The map does not mention this, but the elevator goes to all the floors, but not go onto the roof.)  On the east side of the elevator is a four meter long and two meter wide staircase, and on the west there is another staircase with the same dimension.  (The map does not mention it, but the staircase on the east goes up to the third floor, and the staircase on the west goes up to the roof.)  Behind the elevator and the stairs on all the floors is a large room, which is twenty by twenty meters.  The only entrance to the room is a door to the south, in the middle of the wall.  (The map does not reveal it, but on the first floor, this room contains a boiler and the door is locked with a level 2 maglock.  On the second floor, this room contains a security center, where all the cameras are watched by at least one guard at a time.  There are four security guards in the building at any one time; one to watch the cameras, and the rest to patrol the floors.  One guard will patrol one floor at a time.  On the third floor, protected by a level 2 maglock, is a room full of forms on shelves that the company is in the middle of filling out, or is waiting to send.)

Now for some secret information that the map does not reveal: The elevator, staircases, and both entrances of the building have security cameras monitoring them, which any character will notice with an intelligence (3) check.  If anything strange seems to be happening in view of the cameras, the guard in the guard room will radio his buddies to check the situation out.  On the roof, there is a large metallic cylinder that sticks up for no apparent reason.  If the characters were to try and snipe their target as she walks towards the front door, they could hide there.  In the hallways of the loft, there is very little cover, because the floors are so spacious. However, any number of employees are likely to be milling about; an evil character could use them as human shields if a gunfight were to break out. 
However, most of the employees will run like hell for the door if shooting starts, so such an evil character would have to act quickly.

The building security contractor is a small firm known as Craehven Security.
  They are a small, cheap firm which no one would hire but a low-priced
bureaucratic service.

Bellinda's office is on the middle of the west side of the building on the third floor.  This is where she will be 50% of the time during the day.  In the morning and afternoon, if she is not there (roll 1d6, 1-3 indicates she is not there, 4-6 indicates she is, if the characters drop in at a random time during the day) it means she is on a random floor harassing random workers.  If it is noon to 1:00 and she is not there, it means that she went to eat lunch at a small, three table Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. If Bellinda is in her office during the lunch hour, it means she has ordered a pizza.

The walls on the outside of the building are made of steel; there are occasional glass windows, but none show into Bellinda's office.  The floors are covered with a cheap cream colored wall to wall carpeting which is very dirty looking.  Inside, the walls are mostly concrete.

Here are a few things the characters could do; the GM might hint at something from this list if they seem to be totally lost.  Firstly, they could wait either on the roof of the warehouse or from any other half-hidden place and snipe her when she parks her car across the street from the main entrance.  That's actually probably the simplest thing to do, although then the trick would be walking away without getting caught and with minimal long-term complications, which might be more problematic, especially if you were on the roof of the warehouse, and the camera recorded you going up and down the staircase around the time of the shooting.

If she orders a pizza, they could intercept the pizzaman, sap him, put on his clothes, and deliver the pie to her.  They could take her out with a silenced pistol or something while she's distracted by the pizza.  Since there are no cameras in the office, no one would notice till someone saw  her dead body in the office.  Or, if you wanted to be even more cunning, you could lace the pizza with poison.

A shaman could walk into the bathroom or something, quietly summon a hearth spirit, and send the spirit after Bellinda.  Or, if he felt really compelled to dance and chant, he could make noises which could easily be interpreted from the outside as him straining on the toilet. <g> Plus, if everyone thought he was constipated in the bathroom, he could also spend a long time erasing his astral signature. <g>

If Bellinda goes out to eat at the restaurant, she could be pulled into an alley on the way and dispatched.

If the characters feel like taking a few days, they can spend part of the week observing Bellinda's driving route.  They could either kill her at her small, dirty apartment, or they could kill her en route one morning.  If they wanted to be fancy, they could wire her engine with a big chunk of C4 one night, so that it would blow up and kill her when she tries to go to work in the morning.  Or, if they wanted to be extremely fancy, they could wire a small C4 charge near one of the front wheels of the car, and another big one near the gas tank.  They could detonate the small charge by radio, make the car crash, and detonate the big charge when the car crashes into something, thereby making the incident look a lot like an ordinary car crash to the casual observer.

That should be enough suggestions, but don't mention them unless the characters have no idea what to do, or if they seem to be fixated on the idea of going postal in the office building and killing everyone they see, which is decidedly not what you're supposed to do in Shadowrun. 

Act IV: The Deed, or Action!!

Only Wanadoo and his circle of friends at the office have been talking about hiring shadowrunners, so most people there won't have any idea of what is about to happen.  This also means that they are likely to report suspicious figures in the building to a security guard if they notice them.  There will be at least some workers wandering about on each floor out of the cubicles at any given time during the day, so it will be hard to, say, produce a gun in the middle of the second floor without anyone seeing it.

If audible shooting starts, or if a gun can be seen though any of the security cameras, then any of the remaining guards will call Lone Star and report a gunfight.  In about ten minutes (which is many, many combat rounds; combat rounds are about three seconds each), 2d4 Lone Star cops will show up to teach the characters a lesson.  If the characters manage to defeat the cops, twice as many will arrive in another three minutes.  If they are defeated, twice the number that will defeated will arrive in 2-3 minutes.  This will happen until the characters are gone, or dead.

You can find the stats for the Lone Star cops in your sourcebook.  The office security guards will have the same attributes as the Lone Star cops, but they won't have the same skills or equipment.  The office security guards will have the following skills: Pistols 3, Unarmed Combat 3.  They will have the following equipment: Fichetti Security 500a (6L damage code) pistols with 2 extra clips each, flashlights, and Armor Clothing (3/0).  The Lone Star cops are much more dangerous because of their Manhunter pistols, which can easily change even an armored shadowrunner to catfood in a single short-range burst.  Lone Star intervening is a Very Bad Thing.

Now, having given one set of stats, I really should give what many would consider the most important stats in this mission: the stats of Sandra Bellinda herself.  Sandra Bellinda carries a Model 101T Beretta for self defense (6L damage).  She doesn't have any extra clips; the full load of the gun is all she's got.  She is wearing a gaudy suit, but she has no armor. Her attributes are Strength 2, Body 4, Intelligence 2, Charisma 1, Willpower 4, and Quickness 1.  Her Reaction is 1, and her Initiative is 1+1d6.  She has a combat pool of 3 dice.  She has a Pistols skill of 1, and after receiving a Light wound she will try and flee at all costs.

Remember, let the characters tell you what they're doing; it's much better not to prompt them.  Use your common sense and the rules to sort out what's going to happen, for better or for worse.  Everything you need to know for this has been covered above.  When the mission is accomplished, remind them to call their Johnson so that they can arrange to get paid.

Act V: Getting Paid

Back at Barflee's, Wanadoo will pay the runners whatever the agreed fee was, if the mission was successful.  He will act very happy if the mission was accomplished neatly and without collateral damage, like it was supposed to have been done.  He will act scared and disappointed if the mission was accomplished with a Rambo-esque bloodbath.

Each character will get up to 3 karma points: 1 for surviving (in Shadowrun, you always receive one point for surviving, whether or not you were successful), 1 if the target was killed, and 1 for those characters who acted in a "professional manner".  In this case that means not causing collateral damage, not causing destruction of property, and not killing anyone who was not the target of the assassination.

Well, that's all.  If this was one of your first adventures, I hope you enjoyed it.

_________________

- The Blood Soaked Ronin <http://www.stuco.uni-oldenburg.de/~james/runs/local_boss/[email protected]> (11:22:31/20-06-2000)