The Found Arcana – Chapter 5 [OOC]
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The Found Arcana – Chapter 5 [OOC]
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We’re getting to the end of Chapter 5. Andrew will pay you at the end of the meal. 24 hours * 100 nuyen per hour = 2,400 nuyen each In our math, this 7,200 nuyen (total) is probably agency money.
We can keep the conversation with Andrew going as long as we want. Similarly, given the open-world nature of the game, individuals are free to pursue any of their aims. For example, we could RP the meet between Bobby and Tiko Nine Knives of the Tiošpaye, should Jack want to close Bobby’s debt with a bit of ceremony.
I’ll hold off on the final karma award until we’ve wrapped up. This Chapter has been quite a bit longer than our other chapters, and very RP-heavy too, so the karma award will be larger than what we did for the first four chapters.
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So if I follow correctly:
1. We get 40200 (33K + 7.2K) agency money 10,050 each.
2. 3.333K each for selling the information.
3. AM keeps the 500 from Chaz quiet.
Total of 13,883 – which would all go to reduce debt by 7500 (from in debt 5 to in debt 4).
rent is 1880 or so.
and she’ll have 3,000 interest for 30k remaining loan.
1503 left to pay expenses, and perhaps get her something shiny.
We paid Jack’s contact, and I think we paid Jhonney for the meetings with Ancients and First Nations. Anything else? Can someone find the exact amounts?
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If you don’t mind, I’d like to write up the closing of Bobby’s ledger.
Is anyone up to GM the next chapter? Otherwise, I’d take up the mantle again, so Tecumseh can get Mato back into play.
So (10.050 + 3.333)*0,85 +20 -300 – 1.850 – 3.400 = 5.876 Nuyen for Bobby after all expenses are paid.
Bobby wants to buy himself a trode patch (w/cover) to communicate easier while transformed for 1500.
Leaving 4373 Nuyen.
4000 of those, Bobby will lend to AM to help her reduce her debt quicker
373 go to money on hand
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She’ll be speechless.
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Mato is actually paying off the rest of his debt while he’s away. I’m toying around in my head with what that actually entails as far as personal development. But he’s free and clear.
Gilga and Jawsey, can we get a count (in nuyen) of remaining debt? How close are we to being done with it?
I’ll advance things to the end of lunchtime. Then there’s the afternoon available until Bobby is meeting his contact, if anyone wants to do anything.
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AM will have a debt of 30,000 including 4000 loan from Bobby. So there is time I think…. But I really enjoy her having a cyberdeck so it is worth the hustle.
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Dang, woman, you really know how to rack up the bills.
Mato might be sitting on something between 10,000 and 15,000 that he would be able to loan to help keep the interest payments down. He’ll eventually need it back to upgrade his cyberware, but the first step for that is in the 55K to 60K range so that’s a long way off. (Basically upgrading from Used to better grades to free up an Essence hole for new ‘ware.) I may need to have him sell out to Green Toes or it’s going to take two more years of playing to accumulate that much.
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Good stuff, Jack.
I thought Bobby was going to meet Tiko later in the afternoon at a bar, but I like the laundromat.
I’m going to pretend that Bobby went straight there as a falcon and showed up naked. Or, since it’s a laundromat, maybe he stole a pair of wet sweatpants.
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Ha, hadn’t thought of that
I think I stole that particular idea from a Jack Reacher novel.
Time for the next interlude 😀
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Jack, great writing.
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@beta Did you want to get Jawsey to check into a hotel? If it’s going to be Middle lifestyle (to satisfy Jawsey’s Creature of Comfort) then it will probably have to be across the border in Bellevue. It’s generally the off-season but maybe Thanksgiving weekend is driving up demand, should people still travel for such things in the future. So maybe 100 nuyen/night.
@all Looking ahead – unless Jack needs the power off for the plot of the next chapter – power will be back on Sunday, so that’s two more nights without it.
@jack_spade When does the next chapter take place, time-wise? We’re at the end of November.
I have three half-ideas for Interludes. The primary concern is that they could go down a rabbit hole fairly quickly, turning into full chapters. I could run one or maybe even two of those with the understanding that they wouldn’t be full jobs but rather ticklers or seeds for the future. Or I’m open to someone else running an Interlude.
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Technically I think it is my turn to run a chapter, but if Jack feels like it, I do not mind as I love his GM style.
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By no means do I want to cut you out 😉
If you have a good idea for a run, please get us in there
I’m not particularly dependent on any time frame – Though Christmas as a backdrop would work quite well.
Bobby would be away because the threats from the Helloweeners are getting a bit much and he has to lay low.
@all
I just want to mention: I’m fragging proud of you all for keeping this game alive with such consistently great content and story. It’s such a great setting and backdrop too – having the characters just dip their toes into the world of Shadowrunners but otherwise experiencing the every day live a sixth world resident has to put up with is delightful on so many levels.
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@Jack I had a preliminary idea with the Widow/Spyders, but it can also happen after your chapter. August is busy for me due to children out of school and the most important conference deadline for me.
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Alright, then I’ll take it from there after the Interlude.
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Good post, @gilga . Lots of vulnerability there. And great response from Jack too.
I’ll let this play out – plus Jawsey checking into a hotel – before we move on to karma and the next Interlude.
I was reviewing some of our old threads and realized that we’re coming up on our 2-year anniversary. I play Awakened characters 90% of the time. Ironically, the one game where there’s a good amount of karma and longevity (but not necessarily nuyen) is the one where I play a cyber-heavy mundane character.
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Jawsey still has two dots of debt left (2 karma, 15knY to pay off). He had nearly a payment left from last session, so he will pay one of those off here and still owe 7.5knY. He’ll spend a couple of nights in a hotel, and start making plans to toughen up … one of these days.
I’m really impressed with this group too. It is so hard to keep games going online, and to do it after the original GM drops out? Amazing! But on top of that, this is absolutely the neatest SR game I’ve played in because of the quirky characters and the variety of situations that come with multiple GMs. Well, plus that whole ‘being of the shadow world, but not shadow runners’ opens up a really broad sweep of story that typical games don’t address. I’m just SO happy that I stumbled into this game 🙂
I’ll admit that if at the outset I’d had more faith in the longevity of the game I might have put more thought into a character with a smoother development path and a more subtle background to work from. Jawsey was more crafted for a short story or two than an on-going serial … but oddly I think this past session may have turned a corner, both in terms of his character and after spending this karma maybe finally reaching a more useful amount of magic.
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If I had known the game was going to last this long, I would have dusted off one of my Awakened concepts. I have a troll adept with a cyberarm that’s been floating around my head for a while, although I personally find trolls challenging because their size is so incompatible with most conceptions of reality (even a made-up future reality).
The “slice of life” scenes or sequences are some of my very favorites. Another idea I’ve had rolling around in my head is a game that doesn’t have traditional shadowruns (in the sense of jobs), but is basically a long “day in the life” campaign, where there are adventures and encounters and other Sixth World wildness, but not necessarily the “meet/legwork/job” trinity. Basically just a long sequence of Interludes would be the best description.
Two years in and I still don’t feel like I have a good grip on Mato. Although in truth part of that comes from “him”, in these sense that I don’t think he has a rich inner life/personality. Usually I can write about my characters for pages and pages, but when I think of Mato during his downtime I usually imagine him staring off into the distance, or watching out the window, or out for a run with an empty mind. Maybe he’s a Zen master, but more likely it’s the product of his massive Essence loss, of trading his soul for physical prowess.
I appreciated Jack’s call-out in the Tiko post about “an ork who cut of his own limbs and replaced them with metal – just like that because he could and wanted to.” As a teenager, one of the lines of Shadowrun fiction that affected me most was from 2XS where Dirk Montgomery is looking over the profile of a shadowrunner and notes that the runner’s cyberlimbs were “voluntary replacements”. He then wonders what sort of person walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Take these perfectly good arms that I’ve had my whole life and chop them off.” That idea was really a mindfrag for me 25+ years ago.
Returning to the present, karma awards are still in progress but I’ll share some thoughts. I’m a data analyst in real life so, naturally, I’ll analyze what data we have:
Chapter 1 – 157 posts – 25 karma – 0.16 karma per post
Chapter 2 – 292 posts – 30 karma – 0.10 karma per post
Chapter 3 – 326 posts – 25 karma – 0.08 karma per post
Chapter 4 – 292 posts – 20 karma – 0.07 karma per post
Chapter 5 – 414+ posts – TBD – TBD
As you can see, karma awards have actually been trending downward in the sense of how much karma has been awarded vis-a-vis the length of the chapter. Chapter 1 is an outlier because Lorebane kind of punted at the end and cut it short. (It would be even more of an outlier on a per-person basis if we took into account that there were five of us including Lorebane, rather than the four that have continued.) Chapter 2-3 were all of a similar length. Chapter 5 has been our longest by far – almost 100 posts longer than the second-longest chapter – and featured some particularly rich RP, which will be reflected in the karma award. We’re two years into this so at this point I’m not particularly worried about ruining characters or corrupting anyone with power. Plus we have dragons and free spirits in the mix now to help keep things in check.
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Speaking of characters, I am immensely surprised by Bobby’s development myself. The basic personality and name I took from an existing character I played as an NPC in the MechWarrior 3 RPG.
That one soon ended in tragedy.
Seems like Bobby there just didn’t have the right environment to flourish (and couldn’t just fly away, but had to get into his Jenner to beat it)
There are still some things I want to develop or which I would build differently now (his reliance on a fetish for example), but overall I’m happy that Bobby didn’t turn out to be a one trick pony (Even though he has just one, but quite impressive trick 😉 )
For Karma, the average seems to be 0.10, that would put us at 40.
The method Aria introduced (2 posts = 1 Karma) would have gained us about 50 karma each for comparison.
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I’m not ready to go full Aria yet, if only because her reward has a nuyen component that would make eliminating our debt trivial. I’m open to that once we’re all out of debt and really ready to take the brakes off, but for now let’s keep things to the GM rewards and the contracted nuyen amounts.
I’m hesitant to award karma while we have such a rich vein of RP going in the IC thread, but here’s what I’m thinking so far:
We had a mid-game award of 7 karma back on page 3. If you haven’t banked that yet, go ahead and do so now.
On top of that, an additional 35 karma, for a total of 42 all-purpose karma for the chapter.
Next, we’ll turn to knowledge karma. So far this has been limited to the Interludes but I think it’s warranted after such an RP-heavy chapter. So for that:
– 7 knowledge karma to be spent on Academic / Professional knowledge skills, or contacts related to those
– 7 knowledge karma to be spent on Language / Street knowledge skills, or contacts related to those
– 7 knowledge karma to be spent on Interest knowledge skills, or contacts related to those
Knowledge karma can be combined with all-purpose karma, or it can be banked if you want to save up for something following the Interlude (which will likely include a few more points of knowledge karma).
Now contact upgrades:
– Jawsey’s contact Green Toes is now Connection 3.
– Jawsey’s contact Zwipe is now Loyalty 5, but his profession is now “Ganger (?) / Technician”
– Jawsey’s and Bobby’s contact Lysander is now Connection 4, Loyalty 3 for both (I know Bobby took the lead on this interaction ICly but I don’t see any reason why Jawsey wouldn’t have been involved too)
– Everyone’s contact Katsuo “Andrew” Musai is now Loyalty 3
There we have it. Now I just have to review the IC thread to record what nuyen was spent so we can finalize that math.
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