To Live and Die in L.A.

Chapter One — 2076: The Auditions

Los Angeles, February 2076. A new team of shadowrunners arrives in the City of Angels, hoping to find work in a sprawling metropolis where corporate wealth and Hollywood glamour exist alongside flooded neighborhoods, criminal gangs, and the ruins left by the Fall.

Their careers begin with a series of auditions arranged by Ganef, a small-time fixer looking to assemble a dependable team. Carbon Copy, Fender, Rex Dart, Sam, Steps in Shadows, and Woodstock are sent to an automated corporate training facility on the edge of the Mojave Desert. What initially resembles a harmless exercise involving holograms and automated security turns dangerous when armed attackers unexpectedly breach the facility. The runners defeat their opposition, complete the assignment, and earn Ganef’s approval.

Their second audition takes them to Palos Verdes Island, where smuggler Reno Pyatt needs a missing package recovered from the territory of a gang called the ShitKickers. Discovering that the courier has been captured, the runners wisely avoid a direct assault on the gang’s fortified headquarters. Instead, they create a distraction, recover the package from a ferry terminal, and escape. The courier, however, remains behind.

The final audition is considerably more ambitious. Brother 9, a Chinese fixer operating in Los Angeles, hires the team to recover valuable cargo from a container ship seized by pirates several hundred kilometers offshore. The runners commandeer a fishing boat, board the freighter during a storm, and fight their way to its bridge. After rescuing the ship’s pilots, they discover that the mysterious cargo consists of fifteen malnourished young women and a strange object resembling an egg, apparently containing a young artificial intelligence.

The runners deliver the cargo to Brother 9, gaining a new contact named Cygnet and graduating from Ganef’s auditions into the world of professional shadowrunning.

Their next assignment embraces Hollywood’s particular brand of absurdity. A would-be film producer hires them to steal a secret screenplay from a movie set. Rather than fight their way into the studio, the team attends an open casting call and wins legitimate access as background extras. Woodstock even earns a temporary Screen Actors Guild membership. The theft succeeds, but their employer disappears without paying them, forcing the runners to seek another buyer for the script.

A more serious assignment soon follows. An anonymous employer wants Horizon’s newest commlink delayed before it reaches the market. The runners travel between Las Vegas, Seattle, and Los Angeles, manipulating the engineers and managers responsible for the product’s release through deception, blackmail, and carefully engineered personal crises.

By the end of March, the team has demonstrated a remarkable willingness to improvise. They’ve survived a live-fire training exercise, recovered contraband, boarded a pirate vessel, infiltrated a film set, and interfered with a major corporate product launch. They’re ready for bigger jobs. Unfortunately, bigger jobs mean bigger enemies.

Chapter Two — 2076: The Price of Doing Business

In April, the runners are hired to investigate two Los Angeles gang members, Alec Littletree and Xa Firebird. The assignment begins as routine surveillance, but the team soon discovers connections to a mysterious new drug moving through the city’s criminal underground. When Xa witnesses a major transaction involving gang members, organized crime figures, and corporate representatives, the team’s employer offers a substantial bonus to eliminate him before he can reveal what he has seen. The runners accept. Their willingness to kill for money earns them standing with the Komun’go, a Korean criminal organization that will become increasingly important to their future.

Not every assignment involves mundane criminal activity. A free spirit working through a Chinatown herbalist hires the team to recover a magical Coin of Luck from smugglers at the harbor. After fighting off a Triad ambush, the runners deliver the artifact and accept a second commission to recover another coin from the flooded ruins near the former Los Angeles International Airport. Their search takes them into a submerged convention center inhabited by disturbed survivors and a dangerous toxic spirit. The entity deceives them with visions of treasure, nearly turning their greed against them before they recognize the illusion, defeat the spirit, and recover the coin.

Back on dry land, the runners become increasingly entangled in the city’s drug trade. Kaz Yakamura, a senior Komun’go figure, hires them to steal the body of Jania Shields, a journalist investigating the distribution of a new drug. With help from Cygnet, they infiltrate a DocWagon morgue, incapacitate the Knight Errant officers conducting her autopsy, and arrange for the corpse to disappear. Unfortunately, the investigative evidence they recover proves useless, while the dead reporter’s commlink remains behind.

Other jobs bring equally troubling consequences. An employer hires the runners to terrorize an engineer, Iwasaki Yajiro, into accepting a corporate extraction. They vandalize his property and fabricate evidence that his wife has been murdered. The psychological pressure works too well: Yajiro suffers a fatal heart attack, and the runners learn that he may never have agreed to the extraction in the first place.

A more straightforward opportunity arrives when a professional criminal named D’Scialpi recruits them for a major robbery of a Horizon scrip-processing facility in Anaheim. The carefully coordinated assault succeeds, and the runners escape with a share of millions in corporate currency.

Their next employer requires something less spectacular but equally ugly. A financial consultant named Evan Goldman must be coerced into laundering money for a criminal organization. Unable to uncover genuine evidence of wrongdoing, the team manufactures it. When Goldman attempts to contact the authorities and flee with an armed escort, the runners catch him and kill him.

By June, the team is willing to undertake almost any assignment for the right price. One of their most audacious jobs involves extracting four Horizon executives from a private aircraft in flight. Working with a pilot named Wheels and receiving technical support from Cygnet, the runners infiltrate an air traffic control facility, compromise the target aircraft’s systems, and intercept it using a specialized airborne boarding platform. They seize the executives, transfer them to their own aircraft, and sabotage the abandoned plane. The operation earns them another substantial payday and confirms their reputation as unusually capable professionals.

But the criminal relationships they’ve cultivated in Los Angeles are about to become far more dangerous than any corporate security team.

Chapter Three — 2076: All In

By the end of June, Kaz Yakamura has become one of the runners’ most important employers. He has also become a liability.

Increasingly paranoid, Kaz summons the team to protect himself and his associate Dae, convinced that powerful figures within the Komun’go are plotting against him. He sends the runners to capture Caine, a lieutenant in the Ragers gang who has been circumventing Kaz’s authority in the distribution of the drug known as Flipside. The assignment ends with a rooftop gunfight in Pasadena. The runners capture Caine and return him to Kaz, who brutally interrogates him.

The next day, the runners accompany Dae to a high-stakes poker game attended by Mafia figures, corporate interests, and representatives of the Red Dragon Triad. While they watch over her, Kaz attends a separate meeting with Gray-Wolf, a senior Komun’go leader. The meeting is an assassination attempt. Kaz survives, but several of his guards are killed. The runners track the attackers, pursue them onto the freeway, and capture their leader. Armed with evidence of the assassins’ identities, Kaz confronts Gray-Wolf and confirms that the betrayal came from within his own organization.

At the center of the dispute is Flipside. Gray-Wolf believes the drug trade has become too dangerous and wants the Komun’go to withdraw. Kaz is determined to continue dealing it, regardless of the consequences. By siding with Kaz, the runners have effectively chosen a faction in a growing syndicate war. Their enemies soon make that decision painfully clear.

After a brief period of lying low, the team accepts a seemingly simple cargo-recovery assignment from a young employer named Piper. The retrieval goes smoothly, but the delivery location turns out to be an elaborate trap. Piper is a surviving member of the ShitKickers, the gang the runners encountered during their second audition. Seeking revenge, he has assembled a remarkable collection of people with grudges against them. The ShitKickers, the Ragers, the Red Dragon Triad, the Kenran-kai, and Horizon all converge on the meeting place. The runners are battered in the resulting ambush but manage to escape alive.

Now thoroughly committed to Kaz’s cause, they accept one final assignment from him: assassinate two powerful syndicate leaders during a poker game at the Shangri-LA Casino, then frame the Milano Mafia family for the killings. The targets are Hanzo Shotu, the Red Dragon Triad’s shan chu, and Shigenobu Nagamori, the Kenran-kai’s oyabun.

The team spends several days preparing. They gain access to old storm drains beneath the casino, plant explosives under the VIP parking area, and capture a Milano enforcer named Harry “Fingers” Barducci to serve as their fall guy. When the targets arrive, the runners detonate the explosives, killing both syndicate leaders. Barducci’s body is left nearby with evidence intended to implicate the Milanos. The operation succeeds. It also helps push Los Angeles’s criminal organizations toward open warfare.

Kaz rewards the runners handsomely, but their actions have made the city increasingly dangerous for them. Fortunately, he has arranged another opportunity. Their new employers are representatives of the Olaya Cartel, an international drug organization with business interests across the Pacific.

The runners are leaving Los Angeles.

Chapter Four — 2076: Across the Pacific

In August, the team arrives in Hong Kong as retainers of the Olaya Cartel.

Their new handler, Sacristán, wastes little time putting them to work. The cartel wants to disrupt the Smoke Circle Society’s supply of Red Orchid, the plant used in the production of tempo. A shipment of four hundred kilograms is approaching Hong Kong aboard a merchant vessel, and the runners are ordered to destroy it.

They depart aboard the Pok Guy, a smuggling yacht operated by Captain Teng. The mission initially calls for attaching an explosive mine to the target vessel, but the runners find the ship unnaturally quiet and drifting off course. Boarding it, they discover the crew has become a collection of shambling, spirit-possessed corpses. After fighting their way through the vessel, the runners eliminate the supernatural threat and dispose of the cargo, returning to Hong Kong with their assignment completed.

Their next job takes them into the maze of Kowloon Walled City, where they are escorting Sacristán and Jorge Rhys to a Black Chrysanthemum distribution center. Before their visit is over, the Smoke Circle Society launches a massive assault using an army of addicts and desperate residents promised drugs in exchange for killing the defenders. The runners help hold back the attackers while Sacristán arranges an emergency evacuation. As the compound’s defenses collapse, the team escapes by helicopter, leaving the devastated facility behind.

The cartel’s business then carries them to Neo-Tokyo, where the Olaya delegation is negotiating with Japanese organized crime. There, the runners are hired by Hiro Yamajima of the Mita-gumi to recover a confiscated shipment of tempo from corrupt police officers and deliver it to representatives of the Russian Bratva. The transaction goes disastrously wrong.

Their attempt to retrieve the drugs becomes the target of an undercover police operation. After escaping the initial raid, the runners proceed with the sale, only to find the authorities waiting at the exchange as well. Several members of the team are captured using nonlethal weapons, but all are unexpectedly released without charges. Someone with considerable influence appears to be protecting them.

Their next assignment is considerably less forgiving. Sacristán orders the runners to eliminate Vladimir, a surviving Bratva witness being held in police custody. The team intercepts his transport, captures him, and kills him. Before they can return to their lodgings, however, they learn that the Wanibuchi-rengo has launched a devastating attack against the Olaya delegation. Their residence is in ruins, several defenders are dead, and Sacristán and Jorge Rhys have been captured. The surviving cartel representative, Henry Uribe, orders a withdrawal. The runners provide security while he arranges transportation out of Japan, and the delegation returns to Los Angeles.

What began as a lucrative opportunity to work for an international cartel has exposed the team to criminal conflicts far beyond the streets of their home city. They return considerably wealthier. Their employers have not been nearly so fortunate.

Chapter Five — 2076: Back in the City of Angels

September brings another opportunity for international work. An anonymous employer hires the runners to travel to Manhattan and assassinate a senior CitiCorp security executive during a major corporate function. Using forged credentials and uniforms, they infiltrate the building and begin making their way toward the target.

Their plans are complicated when security discovers a bomb beneath a buffet table. The resulting confusion allows the runners to move deeper into the building, where they confront the executive and his powerful magical bodyguard. After a difficult fight, they kill their target and slip away while another armed group battles building security elsewhere in the complex.

Back in Los Angeles, the team receives a decidedly stranger assignment. A mysterious Johnson wants them to retrieve the contents of an old dead drop located inside a sports stadium that sank beneath the Pacific during the Fall. The runners dive into the flooded ruins and locate the package, but their search suddenly takes an impossible turn. They find themselves in an apparently intact version of the stadium, complete with spectators attending a sporting event. Realizing that some form of magic is involved, they pursue the package through this uncanny environment, recover it after a gunfight, and eventually return to the submerged ruins.

Inside the recovered case is an ancient computer disk. Their employer desperately needs its contents, but the technology required to read it has long since become obsolete. The team discovers a working example in a computing-history exhibit at the Los Angeles Science Museum. While planning the theft, they encounter another group of runners pursuing the same information. Rather than fight, the two teams negotiate an agreement to share copies of the data. Working together, they retrieve the disk’s contents and collect their rewards.

In the campaign’s final adventure, Ganef arranges a meeting with an anonymous Johnson who wants the runners to infiltrate an Ares Macrotechnology research facility in downtown Los Angeles. Their orders are to steal information about a classified magical project, destroy the corporation’s remaining copies, and deliver the data to their employer.

Disguised as caterers, the runners gain access to the Knighthawk Building and penetrate the secure laboratory. What they discover is deeply disturbing. The scientists assigned to the project are dead, their corpses mysteriously desiccated. The surviving research concerns previously unknown and extraordinarily destructive spirits, apparently being studied as potential weapons for military and security applications. While investigating the facility, the runners are ambushed by the very entities the scientists had been studying. The surviving campaign log ends there, with the team fighting for its life against a supernatural threat it barely understands.