mithriltabby | Escaped gaming meme

As code that normally flows through a machine in a torrent of instructions drips steadily through the filter of BoundsChecker, my mind drifts into the realm of gaming...

In our Shadowrun game, one of the Flaws I introduced was Weirdness Magnet (stolen from GURPS). I made it only a –1 Flaw, but I warned the group that if multiple people with Weirdness Magnet got together, the level of weirdness would match having that number of Flaw points.

My character Barry had Weirdness Magnet (as well as Perceptive, and the belief that he didn’t have weird things happen around him more often, just that he noticed them more than other people did), so he was part of the problem. But when three other characters in the game had it... well, I had to come up with a good scenario.

I started with the adventure Elven Fire, which has lots of gang activity and metahuman race conflict and all that stuff, and decided to tie it in a pretzel. The player characters were brought in from a Lone Star connection (one of the PCs was a former Lone Star cop who had been fired for being too honest) to figure out why race-motivated violence was up in Seattle, and shadowrunners don’t have to worry about getting in trouble if they violate someone’s civil rights.

So they did some detective work, had the metahuman characters play bait, disguised a lot of mind probes as simple muggings (“We have to rip off this Humanis stooge as part of the mugging— otherwise it will lack verisimilitude! Theora, are you done cracking his credstick so we can loot his apartment? Johnny, should we just turn the car around on the black market or chop it?”), de-escalated a few gang fights by knocking everybody out, and eventually tracked down some well-trained agitators.

The low-level agitators were stooges being trained by someone else, who was paranoid enough the usual mugging M.O. wouldn’t work. So they did some shadowing, and tracked the trainer to a meeting in a warehouse... and lo and behold, when they snuck the fiber optic scope into a crack in the roof to eavesdrop on the meeting, what did they see? Great big swastika banners, eagle icons, and all sorts of other Nazi paraphernalia, and, on the podium...

A brain. In a tank. Connected to a PA system. Issuing inspirational speeches in a German accent.

After they manufactured a reason to get Lone Star to raid the place, analysis showed that the brain was just a random selection from a medical school’s cadavers and all the fancy “life support” equipment was just there to contain an artificial personality that was secretly controlled by the senior Humanis villain who claimed to be the second in command in the organization.

The phrase “A brain... in a tank???” cropped up regularly in the campaign thereafter...