That was unreal, playing Shadowrun today

We just finished the strangest run we have ever had playing Shadowrun, we attacked a literal Omega Mart in McKinney. Basically our technomancer took down the store’s host, then we took down the magic around the store, than I attacked the heart with a 3 round burst of HE grenades and we found ourselves standing in the alley behind the empty lot where the store used to be with the ichor from the disintegrating magical beings we killed splashed on us disappearing into the mist. We literally stared in the face of Death in the process of clearing out the Big Bad.

Recapping we got hired by a sweet little old lady and offered drams of orichalcum per runner and additional drams for the party to attack a convenience store up the pike a bit in McKinney. Recon of the target was freaky, as in this video of the prototype that the GM based this run on. Remove the “employee experience” part of the video and just stay in the “store”, and add magic “employees” with combat powers and that’s a small part of what the run was about. We made the run during the one hour a day the store was closed for restocking, and the products, produce, and meat, was attacking us to great effect. We were close to a TPK at least 3 times, but we used teamwork to fight our way through and killed the store to find ourselves standing outside of where the store used to be, with everything that happened to us in the way of damage like it never happened, except for rounds of ammunition expended and healing supplies and magical items expended. Destroying the heart of the store literally undid everything that happened to us in the store, and also made the store itself cease to exist and the location return to its pre-store condition.

Also we had a post-run session where the magic-users fenced our orichalcum, and with everything shared out equally it came to ¥168000

Another thing to report not related to the RPG group, I’m typing on a brand new laptop with a 57GB SSD and a 128 GB external drive from the two computers prior to this one, the Chromebook and the windows unit after that. I’m really blown away with the speed of the SSD. Booting the computer is a whole new experience, going from a completely cold boot to reading a page on the internets in less than 30 seconds with typing my password into the computer to finish booting the majority of that time. Compared to my 4 YO computer that booted to the desktop in a little over 2 minutes, that’s almost instantaneous. Now I also have a much smaller internal storage than my old laptop, but I still have 99+GB free space to put files on my flash drive so I’m still good on space since I’m not editing videos or engineering drawings on this box. Unlike the box I had back before I got hit, where I had literally less than 100 MB of storage, and I was doing engineering drawings and simulations on that computer. This is bliss.

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No game again today too many people out of town with no internet

Once again I’m unable to play Shadowrun because other people have lives outside of RPG and Urban Fantasy. They are with friends and/or family out of town and are not connected to the internets. Also I face a conundrum as MS has offered me a free upgrade to Windows 11 on this over 4 year old machine and I don’t know if I should accept it. The offer is sitting on the bar under the workspace along with the battery status bar and Weatherbug, if you have a computer and not reading this on a phone you know what I’m talking about. The conundrum is: this computer is running fine with 10 and I really don’t want to mess it up, but there are things that could be done in 11 that can’t be done in 10.

Still unable to get anything done on the Sprint-T, but the concept of using drillium on the front axle leaves open the possibility of making holes. I have already determined the best way of doing this with the tools I have at hand or within easy purchase. First I need to mark one side of the axle with a centerline of the tube, then a centerline for the axle then mark an area for the axle brackets that has to remain solid (no holes) then mark every 1.5″ for holes, then drill pilot holes through the tube using the drill press to make the holes through the tube of the axle perpendicular, then use a step drill to get them to 0.75″ diameter. Shouldn’t take more than 3 days including set up and cleanup.

In completely unrelated news I finally figured out how to use the airfry setting on the new stove we got last year. Using this we got crispy brown french fries earlier last week after getting slightly soggy fries from the same bag before. I take my victories where I get them. And this time it was in the form of french fries that came out of the oven crispy and brown without being overcooked.

Veering to another topic, I have an opening for a live-in girlfriend. Mrs. the Poet has decided since she can’t fulfill my physical needs I should be allowed to have someone who will in the house. The position comes with a bed and a bedroom, kitchen and laundry privileges, and free WiFi. Duties will include hugs and kisses and regular naked time as the woman desires but at least once a month. Note that I won’t force the issue on naked time, but it will be a requirement for living rent-free. Not forcing the issue on naked time is what got me to this state in the first place. If you have a work-from-home job and want to relocate to a gentler but unpredictable climate the weather in Texas is usually mild, February’s deep freeze was an exception. Note that this is a female-only offer, I’m not that bi.

Simple game for me

We had a fun game today, I wasn’t very busy but everybody had a chance to do something. I used my new rigger skills to pilot us out of danger, our technomage did matrix combat to thwart people trying to track us, our other street samurai shot the helicopter that was following us and disabled the rotor controls and made it crash, our mage made us invisible and levitated our van over a roadblock. Our other mage used a summoned spirit to wreak havoc on their shooters who couldn’t shoot at us, and the Faraday cage in my garage isolated our quarry from all electronic signals when we got home. The one mage that was the reason why we had to make this run had to change residence and temporarily move into my basement because Mitsuhama wants access to her research but doesn’t want to pay for it.

Anywho, we have the guy isolated while we question him and find out how much he told the corp about our mage he recognized on our previous run. And the one mage moving into my basement is probably getting an upgrade because the basement in my compound is pretty plush in game. It’s not as nice as my house because it’s emergency housing for trolls and orcs during a disaster, but it’s still pretty nice in that it is sometimes hard to get the trolls and orcs to leave and go home when the disaster they had to evacuate their homes for is over. And that is canon in game.

Been a while, but stuff has happened

First things first, we tried to play Shadowrun on Sunday but health issues came up for a couple of our players. One is recovering from C-19 and got tired really quick, and the other ran out of brain meds because insurance and was not managing to think straight, so we quit early because tired and not thinking straight makes the game not fun for everybody. We did get my character sheet fixed before then and basically I’m a street samurai with a minor in rigging, level 6 pilot ground car. That makes me level 6 guns, blades, and ground vehicles which if I understand the rules is as high as I can go in all of those.

Other things, I’m still plugging away at that engine giveaway. The build video has been released and the engine pulls to 7000 RPM and makes over 500 HP and also good low-end torque, so aside from weighing close to 600 pounds would be really good for the Sprint-T. Also POWERNATION has announced the winner of the 5 liter Ford giveaway and it wasn’t me >sigh<.

Now I was doing some research and the biggest bore available with an aluminum LS block is 4.2", which combines with the OEM cranks of 3.26", 3.622", and 4", results in displacements of 361, 401, and 443 cubic inches respectively, and they would all weigh about 415-420 pounds depending on the FEAD I pick. Now that 4.2" bore block runs about $6k bare but fully machined, so unless I win the lottery this one is an exercise in possibilities, not realities. I could walk to the local C-store (just barely) and get a ticket today for tonight's drawing, making this something that could happen IRL for me. But it's dark now so I have to wait for sunrise to leave so the C-store will be open. The good thing is we are post a cold front passing through so it's not ghastly hot today. Today's Powerball is $388 million for a $2 ticket and the Lotto is $15.25 million for a $1 ticket. I just have to wait until sunrise…

Waiting to play Shadowrun

Short post today as I’m just sitting around waiting to play Shadowrun. I’m supposed to find out what the GM has done with my 90 plus Karma to upgrade my character, which will be interesting. My last upgrade was to increase my firearms group from 5 to 6, which I spent a few Karma points and Nuyen on, not to mention several weeks of in-game downtime on. This is considerably more Karma than what I spent for that, so the upgrade will probably be more epic than that. I need to get some of my other combat skills in the same range as my firearms skills, so that my character is useful in situations that don’t require a grenade launcher or assault rifle.

It’s after the time we had planned on playing but we had 2 players with digestive issues who couldn’t play, one of which was the person doing my character upgrade. No details were given, but apparently there is still some Karma points left and my new skills are not OP but more “Daaaaang!” and I have some Karma left over.

Good racing today, good game yesterday

There were two races at the same time on TV today, the Cup race from Richmond, and the Indycar race from Barber Motorsports Park. There was a lot of good, close racing from both. Likewise there was a lot of driving around in circles from both. You have to take the bad with the good. I was happy to see the 48 win again in Cup, not so happy that Bowman won. Never was a big fan of Bowman. Scott Dixon I’m more ambivalent about. Good driver, but he wins too much. I know that’s the point, but I’m enjoying the parity in NASCAR too much, 9 races and 8 winners.

In the Shadowrun game we finished the rescue of the troll girl who may have been turning into a technomage, and despite our best efforts the building is still standing and mostly usable. Actually things went pear-shaped when one of the technicians with the troll girl recognized our mage, and the code phrase “pink mohawk” went out which was my cue to get active and I got my MGL12 grenade launcher in use. We needed to get through the front (and only) door and I hit the limits of the weapon on my roll and then hit the limits of the amount of damage my grenade could do, and then the door wasn’t there anymore.

Our mages did battle on the etherial plane against Bound Spirits protecting the facility, while our hackers blocked communication with the outside while making it look like everything was totally “normal”. It was a good thing that I packed a shit ton of HE grenades because the guards were wearing tank-like armor and I needed at least one and sometimes two grenades to take them out of the fight. until I got slammed by an air spirit throwing air boulders at me. Not the actual term, but I was attacked around midnight our time (1500 or so in-game) so my memory of actual terminology is a little vague. But anyway I was pounding the guards inside the building with grenade after grenade and whittling down their numbers one by one after I found out I needed to score a direct hit to cause damage even with a HE grenade set to explode on impact. Fortunately I have extremely high ranks in all kinds of firearms up to and including light field artillery so hitting my targets has become almost a given unless I roll a glitch, which is the Shadowrun version of a Natural 1 on the D20. So I was getting rid of the guards on almost every shot even with distractions like -4 on all rolls because of injury from the Air Spirit (and incidentally one of our mages cast a spell that let the rest of us do damage to the spirits, so I popped a couple of grenades at the Air Spirit so that it would leave me alone). Eventually we defeated the guards and freed the troll girl from the equipment that they were trying to figure out if she was really becoming a technomage. We looted the lab of some of the more interesting and portable equipment, took the troll girl back to our Mr. Johnson, got our money and Karma, and will not have another session until after the local Faire season is over first week of June.

And a pork-based counterpart to the FSM, the United Church of Bacon. Time for bed, this has been an exciting day.

We had RPG group today and my character did nothing

Not that that is a bad thing, my character mostly gets involved when things get real bad. Today we were rescuing a troll teen girl who may be becoming a technomage, from a fate worse than death, with the sweet release of death at the end. My character has a sweet spot for troll girls, as there is a troll family just across the street, and his house is literally the boundary between orc and troll gangs on the northeast side of Garland. There are almost as many young orc girls at his house as troll girls, but he prefers the troll girls for some reason.

Anywho, they are still using non-invasive tests at this point, so the girl is physically unharmed but an emotional wreck who will need hundreds if not thousands of hours of therapy to recover, if we can get her out of the lab alive. At this point her well-being is dependent on our face characters having good con rolls to convince the lab techs to release the troll from her restraints and then the rest of us can get her out of the lab physically intact. As my character can’t help in those sort of roll plays, I’m literally waiting in the car armed to the teeth waiting for my call if things go Tango Uniform. As it looks so far as long as the rolls keep landing in our favor we have an even chance of rescuing this girl from vivisection.

Basically game play was about 4 or 5 dozen dice rolls with massive buffs on our side for buckets as high as 17 d6, which would be impossible if we were using actual physical dice instead of the Shadowrun dice bot available for Discord. The smallest actual rolls have been the initiative rolls that basically don’t get more than 4 or 5 d6 plus a modifier added to the sum of the dice. Lately I have a long-term spell cast on me to increase my initiative to 11+4d6, which is a raise over my standard 10+3d6 that I get from all my cybergear and brain enhancements, one of which is basically the entire Library of Congress stuffed into my brain as a easily searchable file, basically Google without the advertising, or the need for web or Matrix access. This has so far been useful exactly one time since I bought it. Anyway since we have those massive buffs to our dice pools so far our rolls have been good enough to keep us alive and me playing cards with the guardian spirit in the van instead of going pink mohawk through the lab trying to extract my team members in as few pieces as possible, preferably one piece per character. Since I have a grenade launcher, and an AK97 on my person and a Cybershot shotgun in my leg, the chances of extracting people in one piece is only as good as their ability to avoid coming between me and whatever is threatening them.

As we ended the session the people doing the interacting thing had managed to get the girl out of the full-body scanner on the pretense that if she was what they were looking for their scanner would be destroyed, or she would be killed, or both with massive explosions and property damage and injury or loss of life for nearby people, like the people in the building. We still had to do the opposing rolls for the scientists when we had to pack it in, because one of the group has a Sunday evening group that he GMs.

On other stuff, I’m getting a confirmation on the quote for the quick change rear axle to confirm that the quote included the drive axles and the 1° end up axle tubes to give a tiny touch of negative camber for better tire wear when racing. If I can get a confirmation on that I’ll send over a small deposit to hold the price and guarantee my delivery. I also decided I’ll just farm out the welding on the aluminum. And I’ll talk to you later.

The RPG group met again

And we did some housekeeping and stuff in the game. I rebuilt the remains of the Ford Americar that was used in the drive-by attempt against my character in the game, the one that I returned their grenade just before it went off inside the car. I had to spend 6400 Nuyen for parts that had to be replaced because they were too damaged to repair, and it took the same amount of time as upgrading my blades skill from 6 to 7 so concurrent for my blades training. Part of the time I’m upgrading my skills with knives and swords, part of the time I’m patching bullet holes in the car and fixing things that the grenade broke, like all the glass and a few things like brake lines and fuel lines. The engine and transmission were only in need of fixing things that wear out in normal use as the grenade was HE instead of AP so only blast damage, no shrapnel.

Then the rest of the group got to have fun convincing the onboard computer to only obey my voice commands, a 5 hour hacking job. Well 5 hours in game, several minutes of dice rolling in Real Life™. But now the car will only obey me and people I tell the car to obey. The car is now a smart puppy with wheels. But I have a car that I didn’t make from junk laying around, well that doesn’t look like I made it from stuff laying around. The car was junk laying around after I blew it up with their grenade. It just doesn’t look like it anymore, after I did all that bodywork and glass replacement. Now it looks like a Ford Americar that has been taken care of. In game I still have the 2 seat buggy that I built from junk, that goes like stink and handles like it’s on rails but doesn’t have any armor to protect occupants. Or fenders either. I tried to download a picture of a similar vehicle, but the page prevented it from downloading. Anyway, think those military dunebuggies they keep trying out because they’re faster than Humvees except with street tires instead of the off-road tires, and you’ll have the buggy my character drives in-game. I would have made it the Sprint-T except in game the world didn’t have millions of LS engines laying around in junkyards like we have in this world.

Speaking of the Sprint-T I checked and the e-brake disk calipers from Speedway come loaded with their soft street compound pads, which is about what I would have installed anyway, the front calipers come from Wilwood with their B-10 compound autocross pads, so we are good to go with that. I might get a set of the same compound for the rears because they are like $70 a set and might be useful for getting balanced front and rear brakes, but I’ll have to test that to find out. I looked it up and the rear calipers take a D154 style pad set, same as a Gen 2 Camaro front, and a mainstay of IMCA Modified class dirttrack racers because it was also used on the GM Metric chassis mid-size cars.

Well last week’s celebrations were premature

Last week I posted a post-mortem on that week’s game session, but the GM said the celebration of the TPK against the bad guys was a little early. Because he had a family obligation due to the holiday he didn’t roll the damage from the grenade landing in the car, but he did after the celebrations with his family were over, and it turns out only the mook with the grenade launcher was killed outright by the grenade, because I had already shot him once, and the car interior bits absorbed most of the shrapnel from the grenade going off inside the car.

My character didn’t know that of course, but when the car continued to drive away he assumed the driver hadn’t been hurt that bad and shot the driver to make the car stop, and also shot the front-seat passenger to prevent him from taking control over my recently-acquired property, and used my comm-link to contact my other team members about hacking the car and driving it to my place for salvage. There was one mook left, passenger side rear seat, but he wasn’t too lively. But we got him out of the car and tied to a chair for questioning.

The mook was a member of the gang we roughed up a few months ago in game time. Because my character is a local legend for doing entire gang wipeouts and surviving runs that should have been suicide runs because he can’t die, besides being really tough, he was recognized by one of the sex slaves we rescued. She squawked to her keeper, who hadn’t been on site when we did our little bit of “urban renewal” in Arlington. This got back to the rest of the gang and they decided I needed to be dealt with. They didn’t know that the tales about how hard I was to kill were true, mostly. Most of the game session was spent in interrogating the mook and in the rolls for combat to capture the mook.

So now where we are for next session is doing a little more research on the gang, the Featherds, that according to the DM is the “pet gang” of Aztechland for operations in the area. So I potentially have an entire government ticked off at me. Or not, it’s up to the GM.

We finally got a game in

Well we finally got a game in with my character as the focus because I have the Tough and Targeted thing. Somebody unnamed took a contract out on me because of who I am and all the drug shit I have disrupted and other possible reasons. So I was walking down to the creek to shoot some feral hogs with my AK-97 and smartgun interface jacked in because there are crazies even in my neighborhood, when someone tried to do a driveby on my character. I got initiative because of how jacked my enhancements are and managed to get a shot on target for the heaviest armed mook in the car for enough damage to hinder his ability to aim. Then the mooks in the car got a couple of shots against me and managed to get a little damage in, then the driver decides to use the better part of valor and vacate the area before I can get another shot off. The guy I shot then tries to get a grenade on me, but I manage to catch it and throw it back into the car just as the delay goes off. Everyone in the car dies, and there is a big hole in both the roof and floor from the explosion. Basically the inside of the car looks like chunky salsa, none of their equipment can be salvaged.

I can get some usable parts off the remains of the car, but not enough to make another car yet. I didn’t get down to the creek because I had to go get fixed up from getting shot, so no feral hogs for the freezer today. And there’s another 6th World equivalent of YouTube video showing how badass my character is, adding to my reputation: “Driveby shooting, target catches grenade and throws it back in car”.

I had to use 2 points of Edge (basically Luck you can bank on), but I managed to only get a few scratches out of the encounter as far as Damage is concerned, a night’s sleep and my character will be 100%.

And this was where we had to call it a night as the GM had a Jewish holiday to observe at 1800