ShadowVegas Art and Ending

The Las Vegas Shadowrun game that my tabletop group was playing has come to an end, in spectacular fashion. I’ve got recordings of every session but one, and if I ever have the time I’ll edit them down to something reasonable and put them up here.

Here’s some of the characters from the campaign.

This is Everyman, disguise adept, failed standup comedian and party face. He was my character, and by the end of the campaign I was so much in his head that I could play him effortlessly. He was a pleasure to roleplay as. Everyman would forget your name and invent a new one, insult everything from your intelligence to your family and condescend like it was going out of style, but he would also keep you alive come hell or high water, and despite his usual tendency to scrape the Johnson for every last fleck of nuyen he could usually be counted on to be the first to sacrifice some pay if it meant getting the job not just done, but done right, and justly.

That said, he was still a grandiose, monologue-loving asshole whenever he wasn’t in disguise. He was hilarious to play, and if I ever revisit a character I think it’ll be this one.

River was the psychopath. Every party has one. In his case he was paranoid, deathly loyal to the very few friends he had, and obscenely, unapologetically and gruesomely violent. He once pulled the top of a man’s head clean off. On multiple occasions he blended people from the inside with a monowire whip. He folded a dude’s spine in half when Everyman suggested that he might have heard too much. He was supposedly the infiltrator, but it never really mattered when he got caught because he couldn’t be killed by conventional weapons and his monowhip was so deadly that he could–and did, multiple times–carve a red path out of whatever facility he was supposed to be sneaking around. This happened quite often, since the group didn’t have a hacker and River was pretty bad at avoiding cameras.

In his own words, “You saw me. Guess you’re fucked.”

DJ Bluntz was the rigger, and also a famous DJ in New York. His discography consists entirely of re-releases and remixes of Sandstorm. He spent a lot of the campaign elsewhere, presumably doing gigs, but when he was around his invisible sniper drone was a hugely useful asset, and his assault bots barely ever shot his own teammates.

I didn’t get around to doing full pictures of everyone else before the campaign ended, but here’s some quick sketches of them that I did.

Clubs was a melee adept with severe anger and family issues. He could be relied upon to escalate any situation beyond what was necessary or reasonable, usually by one-shotting some poor bastard with his telescopic staff. He once broke into a poker game that Everyman had infiltrated, beat everyone unconscious and kidnapped one of the other players, without telling the rest of the team what he was doing, which Everyman never, ever let him forget.

Fafnir was the pistols adept. He was faster than everyone else and was very rarely shot, mostly because he was so damn hard to hit. He also sometimes had a difficult time staying on the same page as the rest of the party with what was going on (here I am thinking about the time when he was arguing in favor of trusting the mass-murdering parasite AI that had lured us into a trap).

Red was the team medic and jack-of-all-trades. A doctor with his own clinic in the sprawl, he and Bluntz were the only characters with any sort of business or life outside of the shadows. He was also relentlessly practical, always taking the most pragmatic and simple route to any given objective. He used rugged guns, drove rugged trucks, and made sure any witnesses and loose ends were cleaned up when the heist went south. He also had the misfortune of being the only person aside from Bluntz who owned a vehicle fit for more than one person, and since Bluntz’ player didn’t make a lot of the early sessions Red got called for rides a lot.

The lot of them were a great crew, and I’ll miss playing with and as them.

We took a vote on what game we want to play next, and as a result of that I’m doing prep work right now for a Wild West sandbox, using the Deadlands Reloaded world and rules but with my own invented American territory as the setting. Once I’ve got all my ducks in a row our posse of gunslingers and monster hunters will be seeking their fortune in San Marcho, a disputed territory caught between the Confederacy and the Union, where a man can make himself a legend with a fast hand and six-shooter–or maybe just get eaten by demons in the wilderness.

So that’s what I’m working on alongside No Honor Among Thieves right now. Hopefully it’s going to be a lot of frontloaded work and then not much effort except during the sessions themselves as the players explore the sandbox and investigate all the little mysteries therein.

We’ll see.