Eye Witness Review

Eye Witness is an adventure for 2nd Edition Shadowrun. It is a wildly complicated backstory for a very straightforward adventure. The adventure surrounds a mystery where the players will be sent around to collect evidence for a fellow Shadowrunner bent on revenge. It will have the players bouncing all over Seattle and going to places they may have never even considered.

What can the players expect? Ratings out of 5!

Magic | 2 | This story has magic in the background but there aren’t any parts where you require a mage/shaman to get more information/solve a puzzle. There is some amount of magical opposition however.

Matrix | 4 | The Matrix is used a lot in this adventure. There is something important locked inside of a system, but it’s not required. However most of the extra loot is either matrix software/hardware or paydata.

Combat | 5 | There are several places within this adventure that will not only require combat but also will be overwhelming odds. There are some parts where you need to run to live.

Rigging | 2 | As per usual, there are times you COULD make chases occur, but nothing is specifically planned for it. There is however a place where getting out of there on wheels would be ideal. It also would be very easy to carry over or start a few of the fire fights while driving from A to B. There is a large amount of travel in this adventure getting from one scene to another.

Face | 4 | There are several times you need to convince or talk to someone in order to proceed without just directly engaging in combat. Also some parts of the adventure are locked behind getting an ally or piece of information from a social contest.

So now onto the Spoilers Section where I will walk you through the plot (And it’s FAR from simple) and how I would improve it. As well as adding a 3rd edition Matrix Sheafs where applicable. I did however run this entirely with SR2 Matrix Systems, which I will talk more about later in this post.

Spoilers

Alright, let’s get into this!

Plot Overview

Everything begins with a flaw in an MPCP chip which makes it very cheap but also extremely easy to hack. One poor engineer (Griffin Moore) discovers the flaw and takes it to his higher ups in Multitech, but not before he catalogs all of the flaws with his cybereye camera. They brush him off and then knock him off, having already known about the issue but are trying to push everything through production in order to mass market them before the flaw is discovered.

Poor Mister Moore is run off the road on a four leaf clover and killed in the crash. His body is quickly brought to the Necroplex (A massive building with multiple floors of graveyards/mausoleum/funeral parlors. Think of a mall dedicated to the dead). Where his body is dumped into the basement instead of being buried because a ghoul who can pass for human (Eric Steward, who created the person Adam Shepherd) bought the Necroplex in order to feed his slowly growing enlightened ghoul family.

While the ghouls are devouring the various bodies being dropped into their nests. A group of gangers decide to make some money and sneak into the sewers to go ghoul hunting. They kill quite a few of the ghouls and a ganger named Breaker discovered Griffin Moore’s head with cybereye. Breaker rips the eye out of the skull (though leaving the memory of the cybereye in the skull because he doesn’t actually understand how it works!) and prepares to sell it. He then tries to sell it to a Vanian, a pawnbroker on a terrible side of town. Vanian buys it and begins to mess around with it when he realizes that the eye still has something in his “last image memory”. He sees a chip diagram and decides to engage yet ANOTHER NPC named Neil Scott who is another chip designer. He realizes its the work of a chip designer named Dutch Donovan (who made the chip, was killed and isn’t really important to the adventure at all but they bring up just in case the players want to investigate him and get geek by Multitech hits squads who are killing everyone who comes into contact with the chip).

Neil catches a bullet from the Multitech death squad as he begins to ask questions to find out more about the chip design that Vanian brought him. While he is getting put in the ground. Eric Steward (The ghoul who owns the Necroplex) discovers that the Iron Legion came into the nests of his ghoul family and killed a dozen of them. He discovers the long term memory left in Griffin Moore’s head. He realizes it’s worth a huge amount of nuyen in blackmail if he can get all of it. He finds out he is missing the key file which was left in the eye. So he hires a shadowrunner named “Clean Steve” who is a cleaner to start cracking heads. First and foremost to kill 1 iron legion ganger for every ghoul killed in the nests below the Necroplex.

Finally, our runners are contacted by a well known Seattle runner named Alpha Blue. She is Neil Scott’s sister and happens to have a large bank roll and now a massive chip on her shoulder for Multitech. She hires the runner to get proof that Multitech had her brother killed which leads the player into the search for why Neil was killed.

This is just the BACKGROUND of the run. You got all that chummer? Cause we are JUST getting started! The actual run begins with Alpha Blue calling the runners in, offering them a solid amount of money to get that dirt on Multitech. When she hands over Neil’s note left in case of his death, it tracks the runners back to Vanian.

Vanian has however gone into hiding because Clean Steve killed all of his people looking for the chip. Vanian wasn’t home but DID have cameras so he’s shitting bricks as he watched a professional cleaner just wholesale slaughter his entire team that was working on repairs and updates from various things he accepted and is looking to resale. This leads the players to get a good chance to talk to Clean Steve when they go to the Pawn Shop. He wants the chip and will recognize them as Shadowrunners. They will understand that he has a dangerous rep but plays a level game. He will give them a way of contacting him and then bail. Once the players search the pawn shop, they will find Vanian’s home address.

Vanian lives in a kind of terrible place (or at least should, we will talk about that). The players question him, he reveals that not only does he have the eye, but also where he got it. He gives up Breaker and the Iron Legion. A quick visit from a Multitech hit squad hurries the players along. Assume that every single one of the scenes that the players leave will either explode or be shot up.

From there the players then are able to hunt down the Iron Legion (who Clean Steve paid a visit and killed, along with 11 other people. One for every ghoul killed) at the next Blitz (A flash mob style party that is set up and broken down in 15 or so minutes!). Another dude (Balder) takes over the gang as Breaker was the leader. The players can then wine and dine or prove themselves to the gang who will turn over Emma, Breaker’s main squeeze.

Emma knows where Breaker got the eye from and all about the Ghoul Hunt. That will bring the players right into the Necroplex proper. There they will eventually come face to face with the Ghouls after some optional fun (which I HIGHLY recommend and we will talk about) they will eventually have to make a choice between Alpha Blue, Eric Steward or some other play with the information they have. If things go wrong they will be ass deep in one of the biggest ghoul hives that exist in Seattle.

Things I changed for my run

Meeting Alpha Blue

One very minor tweak I made was where the original meet was to take place. I feel like the Necroplex being the place where you meet AND the place where ultimately you return to makes things a bit poetic. I really ramp up the commercialism of this place. Multiple floors, mall-like layout with different catering solutions in a food court like setting. I wanted it to feel completely devoid of sacredness, while still giving the feeling of woe and sadness from Alpha Blue.

Amp up the scene with Emma

This scene holds (in my opinion) half of the whole pathos of the entire story. The scene with Emma is absolutely heartbreaking but it is a perfect opportunity to give that “flowers in the concrete” story. I ensured that Emma felt hopeless and basically had wholly given up on life. However I made sure to link the fact that she was able to rewire this BTL into a more lethal variety and that she had a lot of experience and skill with electronics. The hope is to have the players help her into the shadows with this kind of skill. That 5,000 nuyen to get her a place to stay and set up different meets to get her started on a new life outside of the nightmare that is the Iron Legion being absolutely decimated.

Selling out Vanian

Part of the introduction of Clean Steve is having him make contact with the player characters to try to find Vanian to get closer to the eye. I offered them 5k for it (it’s up to the GM and it seemed like the appropriate amount of money for something like this. 1k first, 4k when he is recovered. What I DID want to do with this is put Clean Steve on Breaker’s trail with the PCs so both show up at the same time. This means Clean Steve and crew begin to shoot up the Blitz. I ensured that they had to put in some extra leg work to find Emma since the gangers got absolutely destroyed by the clean up crew. So making selling people out to Clean Steve should have some consequences.

Clean Steve is always just behind them

As a fan of Curse of Strahd, I absolutely love a “bad guy” who is constantly coming into the picture. My PCs always had the idea that Steve was only a few minutes behind them. That kept things moving and in general ramped up the steaks. “We have to find them before Clean Steve does”.

Things To Look Out For!

Decking

Assuming you are using the standard rules for 2nd edition. These systems will devour starting deckers. Some of the easier ones still have Red-5 systems. Our decker struggled hard to get into the most basic of datastores since you had to cross red nodes to get into them. There is also a huge amount of decking loot, though none of it is really crazy expensive or high rating. So consider moving some of the information needed into an easier system.

Combat is ever present

Most scenes in this book end with police, security, gangers, etc rolling in and just firing away. This means that nearly every scene is one bad set of rolls away from characters being seriously injured. Just be aware of it and make sure it gives everyone proper modifiers for range, running, cover, etc.

Props I Made For This Adventure

I tried to make this as full as an experience as possible. This meant doing some custom modeling and changes for some models I did find in order to make some memoriable props for this adventure. All of these props

Final Thoughts

This adventure is pretty complicated for what ends up being a pretty straightforward plot. I do like the set dressing you get to put into play as it really helps you sells the cyberpunk world and examine death in a way that most of the players’ may never truly think about. How many bodies have your players left on the street never to think about what it means to have that persons loved one have to pick them out in a morgue and put them to rest?

Death, Taxes and Corporate corruption chummers, all you can ever count on.

Want your own copy of Eye Witness?

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