#12 Affairs of State

The story so far: We're playing a fool-punching shadowrunner who saved the Antumbra nightclub in Seattle. Later in San Francisco, the company that owned the nightclub hired us to investigate rival megacorporation, Aztechnology. But we were beaten by a lone troll who killed the Aztech boss and stole the data first, identifying himself as a member of Norton's Army. We tracked him down to the necropolis of Colma, as and fought off some of said 'Army' only to discover a fancifully dressed man using Civil War era language claiming to be the century-dead Emperor Joshua Norton, with the troll, Shavarus, as his ostensible second-in-command and the obvious brains of the operation. Given a choice between joining with Shavarus in his crusade of scorched earth against Saito, or convincing Norton to let him go, we chose the latter - only to have Norton's own troops attack us.

So we're fighting. Let's take a look at Emperor Norton's kit.

...he has no weapons. By which I don't mean no good weapons, he literally has no weapons.

And he has no points in Unarmed combat either. Norton isn't just a pacifist in rhetoric, he is a literal pacifist in gameplay.

What he does have are a bunch of support shaman Conjuring spells, including Haste II, Aim II and Heal I. But nothing in his kit does any kind of damage.

Also, he comes with a pair of fire-breathing attack dogs. Alright then.

Fed up with this nonsense, Orion removes one loyalist in a hail of bullets.

Norton casts Haste on 1nv4d3r...

...who promptly chases after Shav and punches him.

One more time, with feeling!

Shavarus flees to the top right, while enemies approach from the bottom right. Our dogs advance on their own.

We search for Shavarus in vain, but he is already gone.

Instead, we find only pain. The emperor gets zapped and shot by his former followers.

Orion snipes the enemy mage and our hero heals the emperor with a medkit.

More reinforcements appear from the south-west, and a dog gets grievously wounded. His reaction? Let the damn thing burn.

Shavarus snipes them both, and the reinforcements appear, trying to finish off our unlucky canine. To our relief, they suck at aiming. Orion medkits the ironically-named Lazarus.

And our fool-puncher punches two fools in rapid succession.

Also, our resident pacifist summons up a horrifying graveyard spirit from a nearby grave.

As the final loyalist's friends die from their wounds, and she flees in terror, said spirit chases her through the shrine, intent on showing her the truth of pacifism: by violent means if necessary.

It renders her stunned and helpless, then finishes her off.

We haven't talked about shaman summoning yet. It's a fun seeming mechanic that's very limited - summon points are random and sometimes rare, and while spirits may have powerful and useful abilities, each round gives them an increasing chance to break free of the shaman's control and turn on the party AND their enemies.

Shamans need to invest one set of points to make their spirits powerful and another to keep them bound. They can also carry around single-use spirit-summoning items but you have to buy or find those.

It's an intriguing mechanic in theory and pretty important in lore, but in practice, under the Returns/Dragonfall/Hong Kong engine most shaman players stick to Conjuring. Players who want to try it usually lean on NPC shamans.

With a volatile living mass of body parts and fangs nearby, and the turn system telling us that more enemies are coming, we send our spirit off to scout for us.

Case in point: to give our spirit its maximum of 4 action points, we risk a 19% chance of it breaking free. This number will get higher over time and with distance from the summoner.

The last enemies appear at the edge of the graveyard proper.

A firebreathing dog oneshots one of them. What a shameful death.

Norton takes a risk with the spirit...

And it breaks free. Damnit. Well, we'll have to finish it off, unless our enemies do first.

Orion snipes the two and one of the dogs blasts the final guy. 1nv4d3r punches the unwanted spirit into bloody oblivion.

It's over.

I ain't your subject, man.

Norton and dogs leave the party and we run for the exit, returning to our cab.

We're returning to where this chapter started. We're hoping to end it here, but I get the feeling it won't be that easy.

We're in a rush now, no time for further obstacles.

Oh no! A further obstacle!

On the one hand, yay, Turm. On the other hand - we don't have time for this!

From shadowrunner to basic security sounds like a step down, but at least she's working for Tir and not Shavarus. We should be clear to pass her by then --

...oh.