When you get paid in full, but also get setup or ambushed. Have you done this? What did it look like?
When you get paid in full, but also get setup or ambushed. Have you done this? What did it look like?
When you get paid in full, but also get setup or ambushed. Have you done this? What did it look like?
The money is really in the briefcase, the bad guys just don’t intend to let you leave with it…
Yeah, like Hamish said – they’ll hand over the pay, no problem… but they’ll then try to reclaim it from your corpse.
If the job has gone particularly well up until this point, you might even have the employer offer a bonus, an extra cred on top of what they were offered. Because that kind of generosity is never cause for paranoia in this industry, right? 😉
📌
The setup or ambush doesn’t have to be immediately obvious. The money could be there but contain tracers. Maybe that credstick is a Trojan. Maybe the meeting is recorded for blackmail material. Maybe the briefcase contains a bioweapon to help clear up loose ends.
The setup or ambush doesn’t have to be from the employers. It could be the police, the target of your last job, or some other interested party. Maybe someone who works for your employer decided to pick up some side money selling you out.
Maybe the guy tasked with handing over the money has a plan to wipe you guys out and keep it for himself instead of returning it to the corp.
“The corporate headhunter with the envelope that has the payout looks as surprised as the rest of you when his security goon suddenly whips out her smart gun and acquires the whole team as targets.
You get the feeling he saw you are long term assets, but sometimes when someone higher up the corporate food chain decides its not worth expanding their pool of independent contractors, they only send the memo to the person that needs to know.
Who knows, though. If you take her out, maybe Mr. Headhunter will consider it an audition and ask his bosses to call off the dogs.”
Good stuff. Thanks for the description, all!
Yeah, corporate politics is one of those things you can play up. If the mission was a success, there’s bound to be someone associated with your employer who’s unhappy.
Maybe there’s a rival unhappy that your success has made your employer look good – or is making a last-minute attempt to spoil that success. Maybe your operation was being run without approval from the executive level, and as a result of that op, your employer has been identified as a rogue element in need of “retirement”. The PCs might not even be the primary target – killing them is just a bonus to the assassin gunning for their employer.
Hey, it could even be that the ambush has nothing to do with the PCs. They’re just meeting their employer in a popular underworld bar, when someone opens up with a heavy machine gun… the target might be some other ‘runner group, or some politician or other noteworthy…
Regardless, it might be a good segue into the next mission.
Get some ideas from movies dealing with criminal sleaze, like PULP FICTION. Nothing ever works right. There is also a small RPG called HOLLOWPOINT (VSCA Publishing) which handles gaming rather abstractedly (your dice-rolls are not individual actions but show how you cope with events at each scene of the game. You marshal your dice combinations to counter the combos of the opposition, but at each successful scene the opposition can ramp up and gets more dice, like the Universe slowly sensing that you are a pest and should be squashed.) The game portrays the same kinds of gun-filled movies and has an appendix of terminology, weapons descriptions and atmosphere to supplement the dice-rolling outcome. Double-cross, triple-cross, it gives some clues there.
The job was an extraction – I had the team get paid by their employer, but there was a sniper from the company from which the asset was extracted waiting to take her out before she got into the hands of a rival company. One of the team saw the laser spotter and jumped into the bullet’s path, just in the nick of time – thank goodness for armor jackets, eh?
I experienced it. The job was an extraction (a cryogenised Cuban scientist) we had to deliver to Solar Invest. Our Soldier was the member of a paramilitar group… which wanted to seize the scientist. His group asked for his presence for an action, he agreed, and this action was the takeover. The soldier understood it very late, and tried to warn us. We rushed to the meeting place, I put the johnson under pressure, and we were fully paid, from bank account to bank account. Then, the group arrived. The infiltrator was already gone (Synth nerves, my love), and I said something like “My job is over, it’s not my business anymore” to save my life. Solar Invest really appreciated (Corporate Clock, my dear old fried). Sometimes operatives double-cross corporations. 😀