THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME A nasty adventure for GURPS Cyberpunk, with conversion notes for GURPS Cyberworld, my own cyberworld, Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. and Shadowrun. By Greg Littmann. "So we burst into this corporate's bedroom and he wants to know 'who the hell are you?', so I say to him 'who the hell is anybody?' and that little philosophical problem shut him up. Well, that and three 10mm bullets" - Fireman Sam. This is an adventure designed for at least three GURPS Cyberpunk characters of around 150 points. These will presumably be 100 point characters with 50 points worth of cyberware, although personally, I prefer 100 point characters with $250,000 spent on cyberware - including the cost of operations. P.C.s should have some investigational skills and someone with Streetwise is almost mandatory. Being able to defend themselves wouldn't hurt the P.C.s either. Of course, any skill could be useful. Characters marked with an * in the text the first time that they appear are in more than one scene. Thus, they have descriptions at the end of this document rather than in the main body. Some of the Cyberwear included here was invented by Dr. Kromm (Sean Punch) and is available on the GURPS ftp site. In particular, Analgesic Glands, Dermal Armour and Muscle Grafts are all his "inventions". There are a few computers with worthwhile information, but I haven't attached them to a net. If you have a netrunner in the party, put the machines on your own local net wherever seems appropriate. There are some nasty elements in this scenario, and it is important that no P.C. group should be forced to play it through. I have left plenty of chances for the characters to back out with their dignity intact, and if that is what your group wants to do, then you should let them. Its not just fair, its realistic. While the plot should remain much the same in most cyberpunk worlds, the props will change - particularly the weapons. Where a character is armed, I give a number of alternatives for what they are carrying. The first alternative, which will be prefixed with a CY=, is for a cyberpunk game using just the GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Cyberpunk. The second, which will be prefixed with a HT=, is for a cyberpunk game where the referee also has access to GURPS High-Tech. The third, which will be prefixed with a CW=, is for a game set in GURPS Cyberworld. The fourth, which will be prefixed with a LC=, is for a game set in my cyberpunk world. The "LC" stands for "Littmann's Cyberworld". Obviously, these choices don't begin to cover the options. In some cyberpunk worlds, the government would never allow its citizens to be as well armed as the individuals in this adventure, and the weapons will have to be scaled down or removed. In some cyberpunk worlds, on the other hand, gun- control is so non-existent that many of the weapons listed should be upgraded, perhaps even to military hardware. As things stand, the adventure assumes a weapon control rating of 3. As a rough guide, this means that an auto-pistol or vibro-knife requires a license and anything heavier is illegal to private citizens. Readers may find it odd that I use TL 7 weapons from GURPS Basic and GURPS High-Tech to arm characters in a TL 8 setting. I did this because I like auto-pistols and shotguns, items that GURPS Cyberpunk is unfortunately short on. In GURPS Cyberworld, the only State Of The Art cyberwear is Ling K'o's, regardless of what the text says. At the end of each section, I have also attempted to provide some sort of translations into Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. and Shadowrun terms, for those who prefer these systems. My translations are VERY approximate. I don't know those systems well at all. Shadowrun players will no doubt note that there is not a lot of magic around in this scenario. But that's hardly surprising, is it? If you want to, put a second-rate Combat Mage in Dr. Drake's clinic and a Shaman on the Morphia. Give the Shaman Shark as a totem and also give her a penchant for using sea and storm spirits. I'll leave the details to you. BACKGROUND "The quest for truth died with the birth of the net. Now we have more truth than we can use. The new quest is for some way to make sense of all this damn truth cluttering up my terminal" - Daemion. No player should have the slightest idea of what is in this background section. It would ruin everything! G.M. only or no fun! Christopher Sarracen was a bad man. He was the director of Sarracen Entertainments, which made simsense "nasties". That is, the company made realistic simsenses based on themes of torture and cruelty. Sarracen's six most loyal employees were Bram Lockwood - his chief bodyguard. Marilyn - his physically strongest bodyguard. Tarbaby - his driver / bodyguard. Retiarius - his chief netrunner. Ling K'o - his chief operative, a woman of Chinese extraction and partner to Quin. Quin - a red-eyed operative and partner to Ling K'o. Sarracen decided to make his simsenses more realistic. So he employed a rogue surgical-psychologist, Doctor Alice Shirinovski. Dr. Shirinovski messed with people's minds to convince them they really were the characters that Sarracen needed for his simsenses. Then Sarracen would have them really tortured to death and record it for his fans. Usually, Sarracen only killed bums and other persons who would not be missed. However, one day, in a fit of overconfidence, Sarracen killed the wrong person. He killed 19 year old Jarvis Rainie, son of Inspector Andrew Rainie of the F.B.I.. Inspector Rainie then started to hunt the killer down and before long, knew that it was Sarracen. Sarracen didn't want to be arrested, so he came up with a plan. He would have Shirinovski convince another person that he was Sarracen, have Shirinovski surgically change his appearance so that he looked like Sarracen, and then have this most convincing of all possible impostors take the fall in Sarracen's place. Meanwhile, the real Sarracen would hide in the guise of an normal mid-level executive in an entirely different firm. Just to make his cover perfect, as well as more bearable, he had Shirinovski change his own memories too - now he couldn't make a mistake and give himself away. He called himself John Smith and employment was arranged for him at Cagey and Case Ltd. To complete the cover, a woman and two children also had their memories replaced in order to play the parts of John Smith's happy family. Ling K'o went undercover to guard him, since her deception skills were the greatest of all his employees. She too pretended to be an executive at Cagey and Case. Quin was to act as the go between between Ling K'o and the rest of the organization. Nobody but Ling K'o and Quin knew where Sarracen was hiding. That way, if anyone else was captured, they couldn't give anything away. Just so that nothing could go wrong, they also implanted a homing device inside Sarracen's body. Of course, things went wrong. Dr. Shirinovski decided to get money from the false Sarracen too. To do so, she sold him the truth about what had happened. In outrage, he decided to get the real Sarracen (John Smith) arrested as soon as possible, and anonymously tipped off the F.B.I. to Quin. Then he went into hiding to avoid having himself arrested. Quin returned to his apartment one day to discover that the F.B.I. were there, raiding it. Quickly, he contacted Ling K'o. She drugged John Smith (as Sarracen was now called) and together they took him to the nearest back-street chop-shop, Dr. Drake's Clinic. They had Drake remove the homing device and Quin switched it off. While they were there, they also had Drake produce a certificate of complete health for John Smith so that Ling K'o could plant it in the files at Cagey and Case. That way, the company would not order a routine medical examination of him in the near future and find evidence of the surgery. To protect Smith's pseudo-identity, they called him "Carl Waters" during the appointment, and had Retiarius set up an account for Mr. Waters from which to draw the money to pay Drake for the medical work. But the F.B.I. was already on to them. They left the clinic just in time to get into a car chase with the police. There was only one thing to do. Quin stopped his car and held the offers of the law off with a contraband gyroc carbine while Ling K'o sped away with the sleeping Smith. Quin was, of course, blasted into a billion pieces. But the other two got away. No-one knew who the stool-pigeon was. Only Ling K'o knew where John Smith was, and she wasn't going to tell anyone because she now didn't trust anyone. But Sarracen (the false Sarracen) still hungered for revenge for the position that Smith (the real Sarracen) had gotten him into. The false Sarracen couldn't completely trust his own people for fear that they were more loyal to their old boss than to him. So he needed to bring in outsiders to hunt his enemy down. Outsiders like the player characters... Oh yeah, something else you should know. Sarracen Entertainments covertly employs a gang called The Goldenboys. When Sarracen Entertainments starts its civil war, they will be confused, excitable and unsure of which side they are supposed to be on. Sarracen Entertainments has also recently come into possession of a shipment of amazingly badly made but fully automatic weapons. Now the gangers are confused, excitable and seriously armed.