Biz
Braxton Jiggs, aka Jar, had just finished installing a set of technails for a client in the surgery suite that took up the vast majority of his one-room apartment when he received a call on his implanted 'link. He recognized the name Regina Jones as a fixer out of Kabuki, though he'd never met her before, and answered. A businesslike conversation ensued as she offered him and his crew a job to swipe some data for a media. Payment details were hashed out, and Jar was instructed to meet one Trevor Nakada in a bar called The Storm on the waterfront in Japantown for more deets.
Jar put out the call to the rest of the crew, and Peacock, the only one with a ride (due to being a nomad), started the long loop from Arroyo to pick everyone up. In their usual plain baggy black suit and heavily contrasting red mohawk, they pulled up to Specter's place in Rancho. The solo stood out in his white and red gang leathers and white and black tech-mohawk, gave Peacock the nod, and dumped his rifle in the trunk before getting in the passenger seat. They arrived in Coast View right as Jar had finished disposing of today's client's meat fingertips in a dumpster, having already changed into his trademark white leather jacket and pants (no shirt, so the ladies can see the goods). His mohawk made three as he got into the back seat.
Paxos was the last one to be picked up, in The Glen, and had stayed jacked into the net right up until they'd pulled up outside her megabuilding. Rather incongruously, this heavy-duty netrunner in a pretty sun dress and floppy hat tumbled out of an air vent in the alley, then dusted herself off and joined the others in the car as they finally set out for The Storm. Soon enough, they were at the colourful Japantown waterfront. It was one of the cleaner districts, which meant the piles of garbage in the alleys were only large instead of enormous.
Nobody was familiar with the Japantown nightlife, but it seemed like just another bar or club, the 't' in the neon sign flickering and bassy music pulsing out. Security was lax, just a pair of bouncers who let them pass, recognizing that Jar's outfit meant he was The Real Deal, and they quickly found their Mr. Nakada in the near-empty club. Just like the photo Regina had sent, the man had red dreadlocks and a black turtleneck.
Paxos took over negotiations, and it was immediately apparent that Nakada was new to this, fumbling over some strange attempt to check their credentials by pretending that he was looking for "Wakako's" people, despite the fact that he'd be contracting through Regina. As a result, Paxos was able to take him for all he was worth, and wrangled another 2000 eurobucks out of their client for "expenses". The job seemed to be fairly straightforward: some corp called BioDyne Systems looked to be cooking their books, and Nakada wanted to see the raw financial data for himself.
BioDyne was a small corp with a few addresses around Night City, so it would be up to the crew to pick the softest target; it was likely that the data would be on any manager's dataterm. Security-wise, they only had a small budget for external contractors, so they wouldn't be up against anything too scary. Specter asked if they might have been bought out by one of the bigger corps, but Trevor figured that would have made the screamsheets. Still, there had been some legal trouble between BioDyne and DTR when the former rebooted in the mid-60s, so it was possible.
Legwork
The crew walked out into the night, past a drunkard leaning against a wall and puking (Jar eyed the man's cyberhand, but decided not to assault the drunk and take it), and got to work preparing for the heist. Paxos jacked in on the ride home and narrowed it down to three possible facilities they could hit: an automated mini-factory in Northside, an office in Japantown, and a construction site in Vista Del Rey. Given that the automated factory would have the least staff and the cops largely stayed out of Northside, it was the target they ended up going after.
Specter went out the next morning to case the joint, but shipping containers blocked the views of loading dock, so he couldn't see much. The three-story factory was on a small corner lot, and across the street to the south was an armoured Petrochem-branded apartment complex with a ton of security cams and armoured guards, so they figured they'd come in from another angle. Luckily, there was an alley on the north, and those stacked containers would conceal Peacock's ride from the factory nicely.
Paxos looked into the security company BioDyne was contracting there, "Frank's Incorporated Security", and noted that they were an almost unknown firm out of Arroyo for those on a very thin budget. Peacock tracked down one of the guys working security, Austin Dilucca, and then Specter pulled him into an alley and made threats against the poor bastard's wife and kids until the guy gave up all he knew about the security.
Breaking and Entering
They pulled up in Peacock's ride around 4 in the morning and stashed it in the north alley, then Jar used his toolhand to cut open a patch in the chain-link fence and they crouched through. Paxos took a peek around the shipping containers and hacked the security camera she saw, gaining access to the network. She flipped through the cameras, spotting two guards on the west side, then looped the feed as they crossed a yard to the loading dock as a light flickered overhead. The side door just had a conventional lock, so Jar was forced to use his toolhand's screwdriver finger to jimmy the lock open.
Once inside, they found the production line running, robot arms mixing various chemicals inside an enclosure, but ignored it and headed up the stairs to the offices. The second floor was mostly cubicles, though a light was on in the one closed office secured with a card reader. Through the door's window, they spotted a security guard watching the cameras, so Jar quickly jury-rigged the door's maglock to loudly stutter the next time it opened so they would have some warning if the guard left the room.
Not having found any obvious manager's office, they headed upstairs, and Jar spoofed the card reader to get access. A short hallway ended at another cardreader-locked closed office door with a trio of placards designating it as belonging to "WALKER LIEN; REGIONAL MANAGER; NORTHSIDE DIVISION ", while on their left was an unsecured meeting room where a closed laptop had been left on the sleek glass table. Again, Jar gained access to the office without any trouble, and Paxos jacked in to the terminal to find the financial records.
Specter and Peacock walked back down the hall to keep an eye on the stairs and elevator in case any guards happened to patrol by. Paxos trivially gained access and started copying over the paydata, and while she was waiting for the transfer to finish, she trolled through Lien's emails and found a potentially profitable conversation marked high-priority about something called the "Firmitas Project". After copying that as well, she jacked out, just as Peacock gave a warning over the radio that the guard had left the security room.
Peacock moved silently down the corridor to the office to join Jar and Paxos, closing the door behind them, while Specter crouched beside a potted plant at the top of the staircase. The guard came up, turned on the lights, and glanced into the meeting room and office, but didn't notice the crew. He gave the all-clear over his radio and tapped his foot for a few seconds while the other guards checked in, then headed back downstairs. Leaving the office, Paxos then went into the meeting room and hacked into the laptop to see if there were any other paydata she could grab.
The laptop belonged to some head office type, Numa Tomi, and Paxos found a presentation that outlined some of BioDyne's proprietary pre-cursor chemicals used in implants. She copied it over to her 'deck, jacked out, and the crew headed back downstairs. They peeked out the door they'd taken while Paxos looped the cameras again, then retreated back across the yard and through the fence, which Jar mended closed. Paxos shot the data to the net address Nakada had given them, and a thousand eddies flowed into each of their accounts.
Downtime
Jar took the BioDyne paydata to his usual tech fence in Pacifica, Miguel Fernandez, a man in his 30s with a deep turquoise leather coat and a light spanish accent. He took the data off their hands, and passed Jar a pair of shards with their cut, totalling 900 eurodollars. In the end, they'd taken in 1725ed, not bad for less than a week's work, and enough to cover their rent for the next month. Jar got a Chyron installed in his cybereye at an outpatient clinic, and fixed his buggy low-light mod himself. Peacock also picked up a pair of cybereyes, styled to... look the exact same as their old meat eyes.
Convoy
A few days later, some 6th Street punk kid knocked on Specter's door and, when he answered, told him that Warsaw, a fixer Specter knew, had a job for him. He shooed the kid off, then went to make the call. Warsaw was a recluse, and only held meetings over the phone of a hacked phone terminal on Carsten St. Loud drunks were partying in the abandoned theme park across the street from the terminal as Specter input the codes and the line connected to the fixer.
Warsaw spoke quickly in a deep voice, and told Specter about an upcoming opportunity: a bespoke cyberware designer name of Haga Gonne was willin' to pay big bucks for a prototype piece of 'ware called a Chameleon Skin from a BioDyne convoy from Atlanta. The convoy'd be going through Rocky Ridge out in the Badlands, and it looked like security was going to be external contractors and pretty light. They were taking backroads to avoid the bigger gangs on the highways, but that also meant there'd be no help around. Pay was 8k. If they needed a ride, Warsaw could hook 'em up.
Specter agreed, so Warsaw passed him the contact info for Haga Gonne, with instructions not to call the client until they had the stuff secured. The convoy was coming in 3 days. When Peacock got the word, they picked up a car with a ram plow from the small garage their nomad family's remaining vehicles were secreted away in. Most of them were still impounded after the family got arrested on a drug smuggling job gone wrong when Felix Chudwell, the admin for the Santo Domingo district, entrapped them for an election stunt to prove he was "tough on crime".
Paxos meanwhile deep dove into the net and found the info on the security detail in the BioDyne network. The contractor was Imperial Security Atlanta, another small firm, and they were also running light: an armoured semi, and two SUV escorts with five total guards and one "expert consultant". She sent Peacock the route info, and they went out to the Badlands to survey the area. They found a great ambush spot and set up a series of spike strips on the route to hopefully disable the semi. Meanwhile, Specter picked up a rocket launcher from Warsaw.
While they planned, news broke of a missile hitting the Arasaka-owned Konpeki Plaza hotel. Yorinobu Arasaka held a press conference stating that it was merely a "failed test-launch" from the Kujira aircraft carrier. It was obvious, and had been for a while, that Arasaka had been in an ongoing three-way civil war since shortly after the death of Saburo Arasaka over a year ago, and there was no way Yorinobu could cover it up. His half-sister, Hanako, and niece, Michiko, led the other two factions, and word on the street was that this attack had been the latest in the conflict between those two.
Road Warriors
The crew concealed the car behind some boulders on the convoy's route and Specter got out and prepared the RPG as the diseased orange-brown sun set and the dust and ash blew up in the evening wind. Plumes of dust appeared on the horizon, and soon enough the convoy was in-range, and Specter aimed at the lead SUV, it's purple livery peeling off in places, and pulled the trigger. But the launcher didn't fire.
Specter shouted at Jar to come take a look, activated his Sandevistan, then threw the launcher at the techie as he scrambled out of the car. Jar rapidly disassemebled and reassembled the firing mechanism (the trigger had been jammed due to all the dust), then tossed it back to Specter, who shouldered it and fired in a fraction of a second. The rocket exploded into the lead SUV, shooting up a cloud of smoke and dust, and the convoy slammed on the gas. Specter and Jar jumped back into their ride and Peacock floored it to catch up.
Peacock tried to ram the lead SUV and it swerved out of the way. The driver's luck ran out when Specter hit them with a second rocket, and the SUV flipped over and soared into a ditch. The convoy came up to the first of the spike strips the crew had placed the day before, and a bunch of the semi's tires were popped. It tried to force them off the road, but the missing wheels messed it up and it started to lose control.
The passenger of the remaining SUV, in purple armour and helmet, leaned out the window and opened fire with a rifle, but their wild burst missed completely. A light-tattooed woman in brushed-steel armourjack likewise fired from the passenger seat of the semi with an SMG, but did land anything with the semi swerving out of control. Switching targets, Peacock again failed to ram the rear SUV, and Specter again hit it with a rocket.
The SUV's engine made a single loud *bang* then went dead, so Peacock pulled back up to the semi which the driver finally managed to bring back under control, though it did run over another spike strip. Paxos breached into the solo woman's systems and began trying to shut down her cybereyes, but before she could, the solo let loose a hail of bullets, shattering the windshield and hitting Specter.
Peacock rammed the front of the semi, careful to avoid the trailer, and though it didn't disable it, between that and all the spike strips, it was slowed to almost a halt on the dirt roads. Specter switched to his rifle and shot right back at the solo, striking her three times in the torso. The driver brought the semi to a stop and raised his rifle, trying to clumsily shoot their car but missing due to the confines of the truck.
Another burst of fire from the solo's SMG was nimbly dodged by Peacock, and he swung the car around before bringing it to a stop as well. She moved to run around to the far side of the semi, but only made it out the door before collapsing, covered in blood. Specter jumped out of their car and fired a burst at the driver, hitting him twice in the chest, and when Paxos shouted for him to surrender, he put his hands up, shouting "This job ain't worth it!".
While Peacock brandished their rifle and shouted for the driver to open the container, Specter and Jar ran to the back of the trailer and jumped inside to grab the goods. While this was happening, Paxos spotted the two purple-clad guards of the second SUV running up the road behind them and alerted the others over radio. Peacock got back in the car and swung it around the back of the trailer and popped the trunk.
Before the car had fully stopped, Paxos opened the door and popped out then jumped in the back of the open container. Jar tossed one of the chameleon skins (there were four) into the trunk, and then Specter closed the trailer door. The guards moved up and took cover behind ruined picket fences, at about 15m of distance.
Notes:
The first roll of the campaign for Peacock to get a car (a 14 or less) actually failed, and they had to use Luck. A bad omen, perhaps.
Everyone has a mohawk except Paxos.
The rocket launcher is illegal to purchase and so should have required some extra rolls to get. I'm just going to say they owe Warsaw a favour.
Peacock failed their Survival (Wasteland) roll (an 11) when they went out into the Badlands, and it ended up affecting the rocket launcher. They used Luck, but failed both rerolls anyway.
Sadly Jar's player had to leave partway through the session, but luckily he didn't miss much, just the car chase.
Specter's player noted that it was fun to have easy access to an RPG in the first session. The economy in Cyberpunk RED is... interesting. It's stupidly easy to make money just taking people's cyberware or stealing cars.
Gunslinger let Specter ignore the Bulk of a rocket launcher while riding in a car.
I treated hacking as having a Bulk of -3 which might be unfair, but I'm wary of hacking being overpowered. Paxos' player pointed out that she had bought Interface Plugs to be able to use her cyberdeck hands-free, and that that should mitigate the penalty. I've now settled on a -4 Bulk if you're hand-typing on your 'deck, -2 with Interface Plugs.
To quote Specter when asked why he was so willing to go maximum lethality: "Why do you care about these corporate scum? They eat babies; I've seen them do it."
I've slightly modified the Chase rules so that Ram and Force are ever worth doing. Stability Rating doesn't exist, so you just always have to do Emergency Action to prevent crashing (except for on a crit fail), and Ram only does 1d damage to your own vehicle (reduced to 0 with a plow).
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