Corporate Assets
So I’ve got, what I think, is an interesting situation with my group: two of the three players are absolutely fine with their characters being full on corporate assets. Not just “yeah, we’ll run missions for the corp if it pays well”, but straight up “we live in corp supplied apartments and are on the books, but not officially” kind of thing.
One character, the Killer, is willing to act against their corp, Haas-Bioroid, provided nothing will trace back to him. But the Pusher is not. She’s not willing to act against HB’s interest. At least for now. Meanwhile, the Hacker is the only one who’s not owned and is looking to keep things that way.
At the end of the last session, the Pusher went to Haas-Bioroid and had some dermal plating installed; she took a bullet to the thigh during the mission and is looking to minimize future damage. There are now three owned tags for HB between her and the Killer.
I’m excited to see what’s going to happen when their Haas-Bioroid handlers start asking them to do really questionable stuff, or when they decide they’ve had enough. But for right now, I’m kind of stumped as to what to do with so many owned tags…
As well as that scenario, there’s also the question of how loyal they’ll be once the HB clock gets up a bit and the Corp thinks of disposing of them. It could be very much a campaign of two halves!
During the Links phase of character creation, it was established that the Killer and Hacker ran a job for NBN against HB (installing faulty code in network adapters so they’d slowly degrade, preventing HB from moving in on NBN’s monopoly of information service provider). The Hacker was able to mess with the tracking data in the Killer’s muscle grafts, making it look like he was still in New Angeles, while in reality they were up the Beanstalk. The Pusher declined to join in on that job, and we decided it happened before she joined the team. Her character doesn’t know about that mission, and we’re all waiting to see what will happen if that info comes out.
Both the Jinteki and NBN Corp clocks are at 1800, and the HB clock is at 1500. No one’s gone anywhere near Weyland yet.
They just extracted Kurosawa from the New Angeles Golf Club, a Jinteki owned facility full of clone caddies and service staff. The Legwork Clock only got to 1800 and the Action Clock was at 1500. (The Pusher “convinced” Kurosawa to just walk off the court and into the team’s car, while the Hacker locked his security team in their own car, then drove it off a cliff when they finally showed up.) So while mad, Jinteki isn’t really put for blood yet. (That will change if more of their clone security teams start dying in freak traffic accidents.)
Megacorps are large beyond imagination, composed of multiple companies with multiple divisions. What I like to do is get more specific about who owns the character. Companies and employees of Megas will often compete against each other, and therein is brilliance. You have a triangular relationship with two agents exerting control over the player. One may want a project to succeed while another wants it to fail. Use that to ask the PC what they value by making threats or offering rewards. “Do this for me or I make sure your mom never works again” vs “Do this for me or I withhold the antidote that will keep you alive. Did I mention I put nanites in your blood while you were under the knife? Whoops.”
Yeah, that sounds about right. They both work for HB – but do they work for the same handler at HB, or could they find themselves divided between two factions? And even if they do work for the same faction, what do they do if they find themselves at odds with another part of the same organisation? E.g. if they work for HB North America, but something they’ve done has attracted attention from HB Asia-Pacific?