ShupFace

I’ve had so many websites over the years. I think I’ve lost count. But all my websites have been with blogger or wordpress so I’ve never really had to do any coding. With ShupFace I did do quite a bit of remodeling based on someone else’s design, but I never built anything from the ground up.

Until now.

I spent today teaching myself html and it was quite fun. I’ve started building a small website devoted to Shadowrun, more as a project than because my Shadowrun games needed a website of their own. I have been GMing quite a lot recently, and this is an opportunity to put some of my ideas in one place.

I present to you Portal!

(and yes I’ve shamelessly appropriated the logo)

This weekend I GMed a more or less impromptu game of Shadowrun followed by the live conclusion of our internet storyline. It is tiring GMing one game, let alone two in short succession. It requires a lot of creative energy to maintain the story under pressure from the players and I feel drained, so there won’t be any comprehensive recapping this week. But I would like to post a few highlights.

In the impromptu game the team was asked by the Yakuza to defend a drug deal with the Ancients from gang interference. The deal was going down in the barrens, so the team decided to check out the surrounding buildings before the deal, in case there were gangers lurking inside waiting to ambush. Maverick the team hard-ass walked into a body mod shop filled with cybered up orks and trolls and was immediately greeted by a troll with a shiny cyberarm. The troll asked Maverick what he wanted in a fairly confrontational manner and Maverick froze. The troll repeated himself more forcefully and Maverick turned tail and fled without saying a word.

As events unfolded the drug deal was ambushed by the Night Hunters, a human racist gang. The Ancient gangers with the drugs decided to make a quick exit rather than stick around to see who won. Payment from the Yakuza was contingent on the deal going through, so Wraith tried to flag the Ancients down to tell them that the Shadowrunners had everything under control. He needed to roll a Charisma + Leadership test, but he didn’t have any Leadership and his Charisma is 1. I asked if he wanted to add his edge to the roll and he decided that was probably a good idea. Wraith rolled three dice and got three hits, successfully flagging down the Ancients.

In the second game of the evening the team were hastily packing their bus with sedated paracritters while a security response team was speeding towards them. The team hatched a daring plan to delay the response team by crashing their vehicle. Wraith remotely piloted two of the firms own security cars and crashed them head on into the response team’s truck, completely demolishing both the truck and any chance the security team had of catching up with the shadowrunners.

I’m a novice when it comes to GMing and there’s still a lot of rules I don’t have a complete mastery of, but I think everyone (except Jed) had fun and that’s the most important thing.

Here are the rules:

1 - Random Wikipedia page

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Random Quotations Page

The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Last seven days on Flickr

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Put it all together like an album cover.

Just as the iPhone has become ubiquitous, the iPad emerges as the new object of techno-lust. I am at a loss as to why this is the case. I find myself asking, in what ways is it superior to a laptop? Or an iPhone?

Tycho of Penny Arcade fame, had this to say:

There might come a day where I don’t feel like a twat using an iPad in a public place, but that day isn’t here yet.  It’s a little too ostentatious, like toting around a scepter.  I don’t like it.  The only thing it can do that my iPhone can’t is be more expensive.

After weeks and weeks of waiting, my online Shadowrun RPG has started. We are using Google Wave to coordinate everything and despite being a little buggy it is very cool.

I want to post some of the conversation between the Johnson and the team:

“Well, now that we’re all here, I think some introductions are in order.” Starts Wraith. “I am Wraith, you all know me. I am the hacker, or covert intrusion specialist. The lovely lady is Hannelore, our resident magical solutions expert. The gentleman on my left is Mr Blucher, driver and technical solutions. The last to arrive is Maverick, aggressive negotiations. We may be expecting one more to join us, but she is running a little late.”

“Pleased to meet you all. Very pleased.” Replied the Johnson, “And I am of course Mr Johnson. Now to the business at hand, my clients would like to hire you to infiltrate a small corporate science facility in Downtown Seattle. It is an underground medical lab disguised as an accountancy firm. My clients are willing to pay 10,000 nuyen per medical patient rescued alive and 5,000 nuyen for any deceased patients, so long as their bodies are in a reasonable condition. And I stress reasonable condition. You have one week to complete the job.

“Contact me when you have the patients and I’ll message you the drop off location. Are there any questions?”

A = Alarm Clock

B = Bible Gateway

C = Centrelink

D = deviantART

E = EZTV

F = Facebook

G = Gmail

H = HATETRIS

I = iTunes

J = JobSearch

K = Kitty @ ShupFace

L = Ryde Library

M = MyCareer

N = Newspoll

O = one dollar jackpot

P = photobucket

Q = Questionable Content

R = Ryde Library

S = Dumpshock Forums

T = Twitter

U = University of Technology, Sydney

V = Vodafone

W = Google Wave

X = XKCD

Y = YouTube

Z = EZTV

Another week, another shadowrun. This time Pitrre (Elf face) was acting as our Johnson and the mission was to intercept an artwork as it was being moved from a secure location to an airport by the Knight Errant security firm. The company we were stealing from, Wuxing, is a triple A rated company, one of the top ten in the world.

We decided to split up our forces to cover more ground. Dain (Dwarf close combat specialist) and Oberon (Pixie mage) scouted out the warehouse where the artwork was being kept. Meanwhile Violet (Elf adept), the Dr (Troll tank) and Kirika (Elf gunslinger) made their way to the airport to check out security.

There turned out to be very little to see at the warehouse, with no easy way inside, so Dain and Oberon waited for the main doors to open and the convoy to embark. The convoy itself consisted of several motorcycles, two roadmasters (armoured trucks) and a luxury sedan. Oberon hitched a ride on top of one of the roadmasters while Dain followed on his motorcycle.

Things started to go pear-shaped when the convoy split in two, with one of the roadmasters and a bike breaking from the main group. Oberon briefly stuck with his ride, but eventually flew home to Snohomish with plans to return on the astral plane. The main convoy then split again with the luxury sedan taking an exit off the motorway.

Meanwhile Violet was talking her way through security at the airport posing as an employee of the very company we were planning to rip-off, with the Dr as her bodyguard and Kirika as a security specialist. Her cover was that she was checking out security at the site to make sure it was up to scratch. Luckily the airport was quite small and the employees were easy to push around. Airport security even left with little fuss when she dismissed them from the site.

The first group to arrive at the airport was the luxury sedan and out stepped two Wuxing employees. What followed was an epic battle. On the physical plane the Dr tangled with both of the Wuxing employees, while a third employee, a mage still inside the car, did everything he could to counter Oberon’s magic. Violet fired her pistol into the combat relying on the Dr’s superior toughness to see him through, but eventually changed targets to the mage, gunning him down in the process. This allowed Oberon to finally kill the last remaining employee with a manabolt cast by his spirit.

The Dr suggested they search the car for the artwork, but at the same time Dain alerted the team that the rest of the convoy was rapidly approaching the airfield. The Dr hotwired the Wuxing car and they hightailed it across the landing strip and down a dirt track while Violet and Kirika tore the car apart from the inside.

Both search and escape were successful. They found the artwork in the car AND made good their escape at the same time! The Wuxing luxury sedan was later torched along with the bodies and any other evidence of the crime. The team went to ground in a nearby safehouse (except for Oberon who was still safe and sound in Snohomish) and the Knight Errant never found them.

This week the Shadowrun crew was hired to perform a high-level extraction attempt on a security specialist. This turned out to be a ploy by Aztechnology to test out the company’s new security system.

The game began with Violet talking her way into the compound, successfully scouting out the security. As Violet left the facility Oberon, the Pixie, flew over the fence and threw a stun grenade inside the security building. The accompanying explosion benefited from what is known as “the chunky salsa effect”. A grenade in a confined space is amazingly effective.

The spider (computer security specialist) was incapacitated in the blast with unexpected consequences. It turned out that all the workers on site were linked to the spider and equipped with skill wires and combat drugs which were all activated upon his loss of consciousness. The shadowrunning team was now faced with drugged up combat zombies!

Pitrre had set up her sniper rifle across the street and proceeded to incapacitate (with gel rounds) the executive team at the top of the main building. The Doctor drove his car through the fence at the back of the building site and challenged the zombies (and everything else) to a real fight.

Collectively the shadowrunning team neutralised the zombie threat, killed four awakened (magical) doggies (Barghests) and executed one Agent Smith (super fast killy man). They even delivered the target to the drop off location alive, despite him suffering serious head wounds (gel rounds in a sniper rifle can still be quite rough).

Oberon had an unusually quiet game this week, forced to flee from the astral plane by the arrival of three hostile spirits. As they say, discretion is the better part of valour. However, he has finally gotten around to binding some spirits as part of his post-game wrap up and he is more dangerous than ever.

Today’s Shadowrun had us attempting to take down a thunderbird gun ship in the most spectacular fashion possible. Bonuses for (a) media coverage and (b) difficulty accessing the crash site. Our team consisted of Pitrre, Oberon, 626 and the Doctor.

Pitrre is an elf face and sniper, and the most experienced member of our team. Oberon is a pixie mage who runs from the astral plane to avoid getting hurt. 626 is a stealth specialist proficient with pistols and sniper rifles. The Doctor is a troll medic, mechanic and shotgun wielding menace.

Pitrre started by getting a hold of her Technomancer contact who gave us some much needed info about the refueling stations on the thunderbird’s route. We picked the landing strip in the mountains as our point of attack. Pitrre and Oberon were driven to the site by the Doctor. 626 followed on his motorcycle.

Pitrre scoped out the area from range first and Oberon had a look on the astral. The site consisted of three buildings: a hanger; a large shed; and a control tower. There were three men in the tower and five more in the shed along with a watcher spirit. Two of the five men were working while the other three played cards. There was a sleeping mage and his earth spirit inside the hanger with two sentries, one inside and the other outside.

626 and the Doctor stealthed their way in, dropping signal jammers (to stop anyone tipping off the thunderbird) before shooting up some merc’s. Pitrre covered them from distance with her sniper rifle, also knocking a few merc’s on their butts. Oberon mind-controlled the earth spirit and forced it to attack its own master and sent a fire spirit after the other merc’s near the hanger.

Highlights from the run: When 626 scaled the outside of the tower, because it was quicker than taking the stairs, only to be knocked over the edge by a particularly vicious spray of bullets; when the Doctor took a nasty burst of fire at point blank range and shrugged it off completely; when Oberon killed another mage by beating him up with his own spirit and then finished him off in astral combat.

We took control of the landing strip and sabotaged the thunderbird’s fuel, successfully completing our mission and thus earning nuyen (money) and karma (experience). We got a bonus for crashing the thunderbird in a difficult to access location, but unfortunately did not get the media bonus.

I’m blogging to you from At The Vanishing Point, the gallery where I volunteer. The gallery is in Newtown so it takes me about an hour to get there and then I spend four hours watching the gallery and then travel an hour home again. It is pretty difficult to be bored on purpose for no pay, but I seem to keep coming back.

As you can tell I have a computer with internet access (I bring my laptop with me) so there is that. I was about to write some more, but then I got sidetracked by Portal. It is a pretty fun game so far, puzzle solving and what not. The robot narrator said I am near the end already which would make it a pretty short game, but the robot is often a liar so who knows?