Lessons in Shadowrunning

GM VOICE: [Gobbet looks up from a dented tin of oysters at the sound of your approach. Her rats, Madness and Folly, scurry from her hips up to her shoulders.

Two sets of beady red eyes fix themselves on you.]

GOBBET: Hey, Seattle. Oyster?

[She spears a gray lump of seafood with a fingernail. Extends it to you.

It smells like low tide at a municipal pier.]

PLAYER: [Eat the oyster.] Sure, why not?

GM VOICE: [You pop the rubbery wad of flesh into your mouth and chew.

An explosion of lukewarm brine is your reward.]

GOBBET: Good, right?

[Half-repressed memories of dumpster diving in the Barrens dance a merry jig in your brain as the mangled oyster slides down your throat.]

PLAYER: Yeah. Delicious.

GOBBET: I don’t know if I’d go that far. But it’s seafood, and it isn’t made of soy. That makes it good in my book.

[She tilts back the tin, drains the remaining juice, and then flicks it into the overflowing bin at her side.]

So. What do you need?

PLAYER: You said that you’d teach me how to be a better shadowrunner. I’m here to collect.

GOBBET: Still remember that, do you? Huh.

I’d just sort of assumed you’d laugh that off.

PLAYER: No dice, “wizened mentor.” You offered. Now pay up.

GOBBET: [She straightens.]

Um. Okay. How about this: I’ll tell you a story about a run gone bad. You tell me what you’d have done in the runners’ place, and then we’ll compare notes on your answer.

How does that sound?

PLAYER: Works for me, I guess.

GOBBET: ...Okay. So this is a story from early in my career. I was a part of a team here in HK, but I did some occasional moonlighting for another group based out of Macau.

I was a busy kid.

PLAYER: Who was on this other team? Anyone I might know?

GOBBET: Not unless you can talk to dead people.

[She pauses. Raises an eyebrow.]

That was a spoiler, by the way. The run didn’t end well.

GOBBET: Anyway. The job was a hit on this tower—sort of a trid multiplex-slash-apartment complex.

I’m sure that they’ve got ‘em in Seattle, too… you know the kind. Seven huge screens, monster concession stand, coffin apartments on top like barnacles on a whale?

PLAYER: I used to go to one back in Seattle. Best way to watch Urban Brawl.

GOBBET: Our client wanted us to break into one of the apartments. The story was that an ex of hers—a guy named Boggs—lived there. She’d been cooped up with him until about a week prior, then things went sour in a big way.

She wanted us to get back some things that Boggs had kept when he kicked her out. Scare the shit out of him, bloody him up a bit, make it look like a robbery. You know the drill.

PLAYER: Sounds more like a job for thrill gangers than full-fledged shadowrunners.

GOBBET: Yeah, it was a pretty bush-league gig, but the pay was decent enough. Not the sort of thing you’d turn down.

So anyway, Sibilance—that was our group leader—had a plan. We knew that we had to go in quiet because the metroplex had a panic system wired directly to the HKPF. If we’d gone in shooting, we’d have been drowning in cops within ten minutes.

GOBBET: Sib thought that we could maybe take advantage of the apartments’ terrible soundproofing and kick in Boggs’ door when the movie got loud.

We’d camp out near his doorway, wait for the ceiling to start raining plaster, then smash our way in with his neighbors none the wiser.

PLAYER: (Etiquette: Academic) This sounds kind of familiar...

GOBBET: Yeah, it’s pretty close to what John Wilkes Booth did when he assassinated Lincoln.

Sib was an amateur historian. Used to bore the rest of us to tears, but I guess that it could occasionally come in handy.

GOBBET: So, we waited in the hall, just like Sibilance planned. We had a guy on the elevator, another at the stairs. I was waiting by the floor’s communal kitchen.

Sib took up a position by the door. She had these cyberlegs that she’d dumped a ton of nuyen into… hydraulic jacks, strength enhancements, the works. Girl could probably leg press a dump truck.

GOBBET: [She pauses a moment.]

...Come to think of it, most of her plans involved kicking things.

There’s something a little sad about that.

PLAYER: Hey, if that was her thing, I wouldn’t question it.

GOBBET: Yeah… you’re very supportive.

Me, I’d have preferred to work for someone who thought with her head instead of her robot legs.

GOBBET: Anyway. We heard a boom from downstairs. Felt the walls shake with the reverb.

Sib wheeled back and gave the door a massive kick, just as she’d planned.

GOBBET: From where I was standing, I couldn’t really see what happened next. I could hear a massive crack as her boot slammed into duraplast.

The door flew off its hinges… “exploded off” might be a more accurate phrase. A second later we heard an ungodly crash.

GOBBET: There was a moment of silence. Then Sib let out this little gasp.

The apartment was in shambles. It looked like a hurricane had hit it. Everything was trashed… everything but the door, which was miraculously still in one piece.

GOBBET: Remember that this was a coffin apartment. It wasn’t much wider than the door was to begin with.

And Boggs… well, what was left of him was under the door, too.

PLAYER: Oh, no.

GOBBET: Yeah… it wasn’t good.

Boggs was dead, and the stuff we’d been sent there to recover had been smashed to bits. And then the building alarm went off.

GOBBET: So, that’s the situation. Our payday is smashed. May temporary teammates are all standing around with stupid looks on their faces. The cops are coming. I’m standing by the kitchen.

[She plants her hands on her hips, smiling.]

What would you have done in my place?

PLAYER: I’d’ve tried to improvise. Was there anything in the kitchen you could have used to resolve the situation?

GOBBET: Good thinking! As it happens, there was, and I knew just what to do with it. The thought popped into my head and I just went with it.

[She taps her temple with a smile.]

GOBBET: That’s a lesson to remember, Seattle… the first answer that you come up with is almost always the best one you’re gonna have, so just roll with it.

Don’t second-guess yourself, don’t hesitate, just *act.* You’ll live longer that way.

PLAYER: Got it.

GOBBET: Now, when I think “crowded theater,” I think “place where you can’t shout ‘fire!’ because it’ll cause a panic.” And then I thought, “Cops don’t charge into burning buildings! They help people get out of them!”

And as it happened, I had the means to create a real, *genuine* fire sitting right across from me. A pair of industrial ovens!

PLAYER: Yeah. Sure. Makes sense to me, I guess.

GOBBET: Right? It was clearly the best available option.

I opened the gas vents wide, set the range on a timer, and motored back into the hallway.

GOBBET: The others had started arguing among themselves. I told them to snap out of it and follow me down into the lobby.

“We have to clear the hallway before an errant spark takes the whole floor out,” I said. Sounded pretty reasonable to me.

GOBBET: Unfortunately, the rest of the group wouldn’t listen. Sib and the rest of the team were too busy arguing about the relative merits of her “let’s kick things really hard and see what happens” tactical system to want anything to do with me.

I shouted back to them that the kitchen was going to explode and continued down the hallway.

GOBBET: Just like I’d planned, I got out of that run in one piece. So did every single one of the people in that multiplex.

My fire plan worked beautifully. If the rest of the team had listened to me, they might have gotten out of the building, too… kind of a bummer that they didn’t, but at least the run turned out well for me.

PLAYER: All’s well that ends well, I guess.

GOBBET: That’s right! You take what you’re given and make the best of it. And that’s what I did.

I couldn’t collect any pay, of course… the run had been a disaster. But after the explosion I got to ride in the front of the fire truck, and they gave me cookies and a blanket. I wound up dating one of those firemen a few weeks later, so it all worked out in the end.

GOBBET: So. Seattle.

[The laughter disappears from her voice, and her expression goes serious. It’s like somebody flipped a switch—suddenly, the look in her eyes is shrewd. Calculating.]

Tell me. What was the moral of this story? What lesson was I trying to convey?

PLAYER: “Don’t go on shadowruns with idiots”?

GOBBET: Ha. Funny guy.

[She frowns.]

While that *is* a lesson… maybe even a valuable one… it isn’t what I was trying to convey. Now pay attention, because this is important.

GOBBET: What I was *trying* to teach you is that you should trust your impulses. When a run has gone south and you need to improvise, don’t overthink it.

[She scratches Folly behind the ears.]

Once you’ve committed to doing something, you’ve gotta follow it through, though. No arguing or hand-wringing, just *do it.*

GOBBET: If you get caught up in your own head, agonizing over past mistakes… well, don’t be surprised if you wind up dead.

A kitchen fire can take you down as easily as a cop’s bullet if you stand around and let it.

—Hub Conversation, Shadowrun: Hong Kong