Sprawl story from last Sunday.
So we started off sometime last year, I think? It’s been a while. Played a bunch of missions, it was rad, but some interpersonal breakdowns meant that the group had to be rerolled and someone replaced. But we decided to continue playing in the same universe, with unfinished threads from the original campaign still dangling loose and old characters having cameos every now and again.
We brought in a new guy, who did not have much RPG experience, but is a cool guy with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the characters we made for the new session tended to suffer from meme overload, partly because the new guy was not housebroken yet and this had a ripple effect on the rest of the bunch. I tried rolling with it, couldn’t, failed miserably. So after a few months of not playing I threw a bit of a tantrum and talked everyone into de-memeing their characters, and everyone decided that’d be for the best and actually the easiest way is to just kill them off. So we played a session where we did just that.
Except for ech0 the Hacker.
Ech0 was the most normal of the entire party, and his shtick was solely that he was a huge no-life and had a sweet bike. So when at the end of the mission where everything went wrong, the bike was taken in by Lucky Land Communications’ hit squad and he spent all of his Cred on getting out of Japan and shipping himself to Berlin, where he spent whatever he had left on a new bike. He is now at 0 Cred.
And as we all know, that’s a perfect excuse to mess with a player.
So right now he’s living in an old capsule hotel for gastarbeiters with a bunch of angry Turks who can’t get citizenship for five generations now. He keeps the lights on by troubleshooting at a tech bazaar on Prinzstrasse. Nobody respects him, nobody knows him, and for all his posturing the only “hacking” jobs he could get were through Mr. Wizard the Tech, back when he worked for the police (he’s since been severed after getting shot at fried his comms implant and the force has been privatised anyway).
So Bill Lowrey the Infiltrator goes to get the job. And, as it turns out, his contact Klaus has a corporate extraction all lined up! You need to pull a woman out of the Bayer-GSK arcology on the west side of the Berlin Wall. Then clone a transponder chip she has implanted in her and stick it in a genetically-identical corpse to feign her death. Luckily, she has a twin sister, except nobody knows where she is. But I already lined up a crew for you, Bill!
Meet Blazej the Hunter, a cool, solid professional. He’s a Pollack, but what can you do. He’s on the team to find the missing girl.
Then there’s Mr. Wizard the Tech. Ex-cop. He’s gonna help you build an interface for the chip! (Klaus neglects to mention Mr. Wizard is not a cybernetics specialist.)
Obviously, you’re also gonna need a Hacker, right? To write the software. I got you a Hacker! A great Hacker! Her name’s Terzi Basha. The girl is amazing. Although a Turk. But you can rely on her!
Oh, and there’s also this expendable errand boy. Goes by ech0. I pay him just enough to pay the rent, but it’s okay, he’s so transparently illegal if you think he’s acting up just call immigration services and he’s at Lampedusa before the weekend.
And this little setup worked perfectly. Ech0 has a huge chip on his shoulder and it’s so damn transparent everyone else is actually scared he’s gonna pull off something stupid. The first thing he does is go dig for dirt on Terzi. He keeps trying to pull everyone into his little harebrained schemes to undermine her, and everyone sees it. He also volunteers for jobs he has no business doing just to get anyone to respect him. Bill, who’s supposed to be the chief of the crew, does not trust him at all.
Thus when, after three real-time hours of crying wolf, he actually finds a tracking bug in his motorcycle gas tank, everyone roundly tells him to go fuck right off.
There’s also the story of how Bill went to a luxury German brothel to see if the missing sister is there and moved the Legwork clock three segments in the process, but that’s for another time.