For the third Wednesday Weird, we'll tackle the ultimate gaming cliche: "So, you're all at the bar...."
I'm pretty sure that since the earliest days of gaming, there have been shadowy men hanging out in bars looking to hire complete strangers for extremely important missions. Need a quick bit of action in your game? A bar fight is always a good pick-me-up.
So, we know the missions you pick up in a bar can get weird, but how can the scenario in the bar get weird?
I'm thinking a scenario set in Shadowrun or any other cyberpunk setting. The PCs are just beginning to earn a rep when they are contacted to meet a client in a certain bar for a possible job. The new client offers no name but wires a decent deposit directly into one of the PC's acounts with a promise of much more.
Arriving at the bar, the PCs are only there a short while when they are approached by a man claiming to be the person that contacted them. The man describes a desperate situation where he needs help from the PCs to rescue his sister. After he gets up to leave, another character appooaches them claiming to be the contact for the job with an equally desperate story. Every time one person finishes hiring them, another person shows with an equally desperate situation. None of them know anything about the other NPCs and plead for the PCs to believe them that they are the real deal. To the players try to complete all the jobs or what do they do to determine which ones telling the truth.
Why did it get weird? One of the npc had the legitimate job, of course. Unfortunately the mega-corp or crime boss that they need the PCs to help them with had a talented hacker working for them that managed to intercet the message for the PCs. Well, the boss is a little fond of games (he thinks like a Batman villian, I guess), so rather than just kill them all, he hired a bunch of people to approach the PCs and hire them for other made-up jobs. Of course, they'll be enough truth to the jobs to make the PCs have to do a bunch of research before they'll be able to determine the job was false.
Posted by Nuadha at February 18, 2004 1:37 PM