The New Year Job

How about beginning the new year with a game of 5150: New Beginnings? Bad wordplay aside, here's a quick battle report.

Ken Folstom, from my first game in New Hope City, returns. This time his group includes Marie, a dropout he met shortly after his failed job at the police depot, and Charlie, a lab assistant (LWC) working at a corporation during the day and computer hacker at night. The trio has been performing some small data theft jobs for a while.

Ken's new plan involves breaking into the office of a small corporation to steal a prototype gadget and its production data. This is a bigger move than what he's used but he's counting with inside help: a disgruntled employee who contacted him to propose the job. Supposedly, the office would be lightly guarded during the New Year festivities and, with the information he would provide, the job should be very easy.

Gangers just wanna have fun

For my second shot at 5150: New Beginnings I created a ganger star and hired a bunch of other gangers as his crew. Meet Fingers, Chrome, Bigmouth, Vicky, Viper, and Thunder. For his voluntary encounter, Fingers interviewed with an entertainer, Nova Corp (a mega corporation) and the Gaea Prime government. Not only he failed at all three but the mega corp and the government won't ever even interview him. Ouch...

So, without an employer and with five gangers itching for action, Fingers decided to raid a building that is used by the Skulz gang. The place is located in the Lower Income neighborhood of the city and they will raid it in the evening. The objective is to hurt as many gangers as possible and to steal any stims found in the building (roll of a 6 when entering a building section, requires a character to search instead of taking active fire, cannot be done while involved in a firefight or melee.) Using the Raid encounter from the book as a reference, I rolled for seven basic gangers with one standing guard outside of the building and the other six organized into two PEFs (possible enemy forces) inside the building.

Arriving in New Hope City

I've finally got to a point while reading 5150: New Beginnings that I felt secure to try a first game. Note that this doesn't mean I've thoroughly read and grokked every detail of the game; that will take a while. However, I really wanted to try the character creation, encounter system and other immersion features of the game.

So here's my first crew for New Beginnings. Meet Ken Folstom, a computer tech who decided to start running his own shady operations [Star, Rep: 5. Class: dropout. Motivation: profit. Skills: fit 3, pep 4, sav 5, sci 0. Attributes: steely eyes, dim. Equip: BA machine pistol, armored jacket, CPU (5) with lock-on loop, local com-link, apartment (LL3) with alarm system, old car, 8 items saved]. After generating the Star, it was time to randomly recruit his assistants.

Ken, Orson and Ella

Ken's main associates are Orson, an attorney (rep 3 dropout) and his trophy wife Ella (rep 4 dropout), a married couple of thrill seekers. He has also recruited the help of a car mechanic and overall "fixer" of stuff, May (rep 4 LWC) and Rally, a bounty hunter dangerously close to the limits imposed by the law (rep 3 LWC).

With crew ready, it was time to look for a job. A smuggler named Karl wants someone to break into a police depot in the space port district (law level 2) and grab some goods that were recently aprehended. Obviously the best time for this action is late at night. Karl says that the depot is not heavily guarded as confiscated weapons and drugs are not stored there (he's interested in some expensive medical supplies). A dangerous job, but it should give Ken some fame and money.