In our latest session of Shadowrun we completed the armoured van robbery. Everything went surprisingly well considering how many times the heist nearly became a disaster.
In fact, there were no metahuman casualties in the entire heist which I consider to be a very good thing. We started out by having our decker follow the van in a car and then hack it to make it stop when it was at the ambush point where the rest of the team was waiting. Then the two spellcasters in the team made themselves and our dwarven street sammy invisible while the remaining two members were keeping watch, ready to provide fire support. Well, they did not actually wait. One of them opened fire at the van with an anti-material rifle taking out the rear axel, the other one tried to take out a tire but failed. Sammy used a plasmacutter to open the rear door and then he ran to a safe distance because my shaman had stunball and that thing does area damage. Inside the van where four briefly surprised armed guards (they thought that the door wouldn't open quite so quickly and when it did saw no hostiles) two of which were in heavy armour. One force 10 stunball with PUSH THE LIMIT edge ability used on it later and all four drop unconscious and my shaman takes 7 points of physical damage from the drain. That was nearly enough to kill him but I and the character still believe it was totally worth it.
Then things went pretty well for a while. The guards in the front of the car didn't want to get out and were attempting to call for help but our area jammer put a stop to that (the jammer was mainly there because the loot was certain to have tags and locators and we wanted to have some time to remove and disable them.) so they spent the rest of the heist hiding in the car and occasionally lifting a comms unit a bit higher to see if they could see anyone with the built in camera.
Our heavy-weapons/demolitions/sniper guy "Lucky Smith" (He has 7 points of Edge but also the "bad luck" negative trait.) also had the art skill so he cut open the containers in the car and quickly helped us sort out the valuables in the van. The actual Magguffin wasn't there which meant that it was in the OTHER van which was being targeted by the other runner team. We got two expensive paintings, some jewelry and a few suitcases. We didn't touch the cases with the Aztechnology logo because none of us want to be on their bad side. We also did not steal the suitcase belonging to Tamanous. Unfortunately there was also an ancient statue that seemed to contain some sort of enchantment. And Smith wanted it. He wanted to put it in his home. Which is actually his car since he didn't actually have an apartment and simply lived in his car at that point. But the problem is that making the character/player accept that we are NOT stealing the extremely valuable and easily trackable magical statue required threatening him with two guns and a warning shot from an anti-material rifle...
Then things went on pretty well for a while. The decker (who hadn't been spotted so far) drove off in his car, the rest of the team used to smoke grenades to cover their tracks and escaped through the sewers on a route that they had scouted the night before just as the helicopter with the HTR team was about to land. There was a slight problem of a pack of rodents of unusual size blocking the way. They dodged sniper fire and the fireball from the other mage but Smith used a grenade launcher and HE ammo to take out the entire pack. ...He used a frakking grenade launcher in a sewer. In a very tight tunnel.
Luckily he lived up to his name and did not cause a cave in trapping us with no way to escape from the angry HTR team. Instead we ran past the gory tunnel section and blew it behind us stopping the pursuit. The it was simply a matter of removing all the tags and driving off the to meeting point with the fixer who promised to buy the loot.
He refused to accept the most valuable painting (1 million Nuyen would have been nice but the painting was too well known and hot to sell.) or the papers written in Mafia code but the rest of the loot made a nice profit to us (even though the Fixer gave us a really bad deal.) ...Then we opened the last suitcase and found the dragon claw inside it. Just a dragon claw, no notes or explanations or anything. The Fixer took this as the sign to pack up his stuff and drive away while shouting NOPE! After a brief panic and going through the options we decided to destroy the claw, never to talk about this again and hope that there won't be an angry dragon coming after us. This was actually a very well roleplayed in-character panicky moment for the entire team.
...Afterwards there was an even bigger freak out as the team finally decided to check who owned the statue and turned out that it was property of a certain Lowfyr and was being taken to the museum of Seattle. If we had stolen it the result would have either been a TPK or a job offer from Hans Brackhaus.
...And the Face of the team sold the mafia papers to his mafia contact (the papers belonged to another crime family) but as he tried to sell the painting it turned out that it in fact belonged to the family of that contact... Luckily he was able to get away with it as he did return it for free.
All in all the team did earn 30k Nuyen and 5 karma per character which is three times as much money as the previous reward we got. Next game is on next Wednesday and currently the team is planning to rent an auto-repair joint at the edge of Seattle so that they can use it as their HQ.
I would have liked some more karma but unfortunately we took out the guards before they could do anything and since no one actually rolled dice against the runners we didn't get bonus karma for facing strong enemies. ...Because that's how the SR reward table works: Getting attacked by skilled/strong enemies will give bonus karma and money but taking them out before they can do anything or avoiding them does not give you a bonus.
EDIT: Forgot to say that since most of the team was either hiding or invisible during the robber one of the players noted that as far as the guards know, this robbery was committed by two masked men and a floating blowtorch.
