| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Decker Revenge |
| Date: | Mon, 8 Mar 1999 14:59:23 -0500 (EST) |
On Fri, 5 Mar 1999 pantherr@*****.net wrote:
> Hey, what's the lowest, dirtiest, downright meanest thing you've
> seen or thought of for a decker to get revenge on someone, and
> what was the reason for wanting revenge? :)
The lowest, dirtiest trick that a decker group ever pulled in one
of my campaigns was to hound a PC endlessly because she had inadvertantly
(but they didn't know it was an accident) caused the death of one of their
decker buddies.
How did they hound her? The most notable mean thing they did
started when she was in the hospital for a little elective surgery. They
switched her charts, and she woke up in the psycho ward handcuffed to the
bed (they had her listed as a violent suicidal with paranoid delusions).
She then began undergoing "regular treatement" for her illness. She
claimed that she had checked in for elective surgery (the truth) and that
some vast conspiracy had put her in the psycho ward (the truth), and that
she had to get out before they did something much worse (also the truth).
She staged several escape attempts during this time, but none of them were
especially clever as she was more or less doped out of her mind.
Their next step was to create an excellent cover identity for a
"visiting specialist" who was to take over her case. This "visiting
specialist" was their own pet head-shrinker with no morals and a
personal debt to the deckers. He took over her "therapy" in earnest, and
subtly began re-inforcing her paranoia. As time went by, her legitimate
psych profile became long enough and well-developed enough that no one
though to question it. She was just another crazy.
She stopped taking her meds because she had figured out what they
did to her, so the staff started putting it in her food. So she stopped
eating. Her "psychiatrist" misreported her refusal to eat, saying that it
was because she was afraid someone was trying to poison her (thus adding
to her record of "paranoid delusions").
What she didn't know was that she was right. Sort of. She wasn't
being poisoned, but the bogus doctor finally "allowed" her to bum a
cigarrette off him. That cigarette was drugged with a fairly powerful
hallucinogen. It took a couple of tries, but it finally paid off in
spades. After one such "session" in which she had been "allowed" to
have
a cigarette (she still thought it was the food), a nurse next came in to
bring her next meal shortly after the "doctor" left, and the PC freaked.
Playing this session with the player was a hoot, because I was describing
things that were threatening, but just subtly wrong, and the player
totally didn't pick up on it. She tought the nurse had drawn a scalpel
and was going to kill her, so she attacked with a vengeance. The fact of
the matter was that the unsuspecting nurse was laying out the plastic
silverware for the meal.
The PC in question was a physical adept, though she didn't have
"killing hands" or anything like that. Most of her skills abilities
involved Stealth and Athletics, and she had had her talisman (which was
her Geas - this was under SR2 rules where physads used their Magic Rating
for powers and were bound by the same loss criteria) taken away from her
when she was committed, making even those abilities harder to use.
Even still, she managed to kill the nurse with her bare hands,
then strangle into unconsciousness the orderly sent in to restrain her.
She caught the next one coming in the door and gave him a serious wound
with the Stun Baton she had picked up off the first one. This got her out
of the room, and she ran down the hall. She had gotten about half-way to
the outer ward door when the ward went into lock-down. She was then
gassed into unconsciousness while she decided what to do next.
That's when the nightmare *really* started.
Now she was guilty of the murder of a nurse and the assault of two
orderlies. There were numerous witnesses. She was obviously violent,
and had a long and legitimate history as an unstable patient. As such,
her "doctor" decided that she should be committed to the Drogue Institute
for the Criminally Insane "for her own good and the good of society." She
was shipped off to a maximum-security psycho prison and fitted with a
neuro-motor cut-out implant (a nasty bit of cyberware that blocks
voluntary muscle signals from leaving the brain - you are still
conscious and can still see and hear and feel, but you can't move.
The Institute was sheer horror for her, as she was abused, raped,
beaten, and humiliated by guards and other inmates over a period of about
4 months. When the rest of the party finally figured out where she had
disappeared to (the deckers had been *very* good at covering their
tracks), they busted her out in an extremely daring and difficult run.
But she was never the same.
But that wasn't the end of it. Once the deckers had figured out
that she had escaped, they made certain that she didn't get away clean.
They had gotten to a few of her contacts and had finally taken another,
much more personal action. She was running scared like a hunted rat, and
they managed to send her lover's (and fellow initiatory group
member's) head to her in a cardboard box.
Last but not least, they had another Shadowrun team (albeit with
less experience) lying in wait at one of her old haunts. Their rationale
was that she was an animal, and a cornered animal always tries to go back
to familiar ground (though the bar in question was no longer in operation
and was just an abandoned building). She had been a waitress there at one
time, and the deckers (as well as most of the Shadow community
familiar with her) knew it.
Unfortunately for them, she was killed through another
circumstance her trouble-making ways had gotten her into before she could.
What was most amusing was that the player was saying, "Man, if my
character hadn't died on that run, I was gonna head back to Sewer-9 (the
bar in question) and hole up there until things blew over." I didn't have
the heart to tell him that they *still* would have been one step ahead his
character.
Moral of the story: pissing off a decker is bad. Pissing off a group of
them can make your life worse than death.
A final note: while the actions and ramifications described here
are pretty over-the-top and would be seen by some as all the earmarks of a
vicious GM, it should be pointed out that the campaign was heavily
involved in character-development, and the history of this particular
character flowed from one point to the next along a very gradual, very
logical, very reasonable progression. Furthermore, the player loved it
(masochist that he was). I wish that all GM's out there had players half
as good and a third as willing to take their lumps in stride. He is
sorely missed.
Marc
