Aurora City Play Report (Session - 1)
If you haven't seen the initial prep I did for this campaign, you can find it here
Secondly, if you are one of my players in this campaign, Leave now! There will be heavy heavy spoilers.
What Happened
Pretech Ruins
In the beginning of the session two of the PCs met with Chloe Alcanter, the Director of Pretech Recovery (The person who manages expeditions into Pretech ruins) who told them about the ruins and gave them a deal saying if they recovered 3 artifacts from there, they'd get 5k credits on top of getting to keep the artifacts.
Then near the end of the session, one of the PCs visited the camp surrounding the ruins and learned about how they can hire Hirelings or retainers for their expeditions.
Assasinating 'John Doe'
1 PC met with a contact that informed them about John Doe, a manager at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant who's been skimming some product off the top and selling it on the market as a new drug 'Kalm'
This is cutting into the contact's gang's own drug business, so they hire the players to deal with the situation. 10k to kill Doe, with a 2k advance and a 5k bonus if they do it quietly (not bringing any attention onto Dorph Co).
They got a small intel report from Dorph co with all the information they had gathered, and the thing that caught the player's eye was that the delivery truck for the pharma company would go to the manufacturing plant, and various legitimate drug stores, and to the park to drop off the Kalm, but before all this would go to the railway station, for no discernable reason.
Upon getting to the railway station they talk to a few foremen, find out theres an audit going on and manage to successfully pretend to be auditors, and after a little bumbling around find the person responsible for getting the Syncrose precursors to the driver. His name was Bjorn Mattix
They found out who he was by saying "Hey did you manage to do the delivery successfully on Tuesday" which was so brazen the NPC immediately pulled them into a corner and told the PC to quiet down and asked her who she was. She then claimed to be the boss, and asked him if she could meet the driver and after a short conversation, said that she doesn't know who the driver is. At this point he immediately started to panic and tried to pass of the previous conversation as a joke, and absconded from the situation immediately.
The players tracked him down to his house, took note of the location and came back the next day while he was at work and broke into his house.
They found evidence of him bragging about money on his social medias at the same time as when Kalm started entering the market. They also found a coupon to a strip club.
One of the players went to the strip club and waited for Bjorn, upon his entrance, the player bought him some alcohol in exchange for his time. They found a private-ish corned and whispered into his ear "I know you slipped up yesterday", Bjorn immediately panics and is 100% convinced he is now talking to the real boss. And then the player says "It's okay, but to fix this you have to make sure you don't come on Tuesday"
My thoughts
The end of the session with the player telling Bjorn not to come on Tuesday is one of the coolest moments I've ever seen in one of my games, Because it involved so many steps I had not planned or prepared for at all.
First off I hadn't prepped much of anything for the Railway Station, All I knew was there was someone there secretly getting Syncrose off the train and into the delivery driver's hands (I still haven't prepped how it happens). I didn't even have a name for him, I used the Donjon sci-fi name generator
But when the players followed him home, I had no idea what his house looked like so I had to make it up on the spot. I described it as being a single room in a house shared by 3 other roommates, and it consisted only of 1 room and 1 bathroom, an containing a futon, a pile of clothes, a shelf full of anime figurines and a computer.
One of the players searched his pile of clothes so I rolled on a random table and got "a coupon" as the result. I thought about what kind of place a man like this would have a coupon for, and very quickly I came to the idea of a strip club. I quickly made up a name (The elegant lady) and didn't think much of it.
But then when a player wanted to go there I was high-key panicking. I rolled on the InstaCitizen drop down table and created 2 NPCs out of nothing that the player could interact with.
I also wanted to make the strip club a little interesting so I thought of adding some kind of twist. So I thought it'd be funny if it was called the elegant lady, because it was for elegant ladies, as in it's all men stripping.
anyway, my player decides to ignore all the NPCs I came up with and wants to talk to Bjorn, who I have no prep for. They really were dodging my prep like Neo from the matrix.
But all well's that ends well because what they did is going to have some huge impacts on the game and campaign going forward and I absolutely cannot wait to see how it goes.