LifeLines

Contract: Housekeeping, an enclave is preparing to claim more space from the Loss and needs takers to go in and clear it of casualties. This is a big project and it's calling for four taker crews.

Good/Service: Service, clearing a nearby abandoned hotel.

Equilibrium: as dice but minimum black is 5.

Client: The People's Republic of SouthGate (an enclave, the PCs negotiate with secretary Rodriguez)
Spots:
Soft: The greater good: Rodriguez wants to be a samaritan, he does as much good for others as he can afford. Takers who have gone out of their way to help people earn his trust.
Weak: Vindictive: There's a long shit list of people who've done him wrong in reality or his mind. Takers can easily find some of them and shit talk them to get on Rodriguez's good side.
Tough: This has to happen. The whole enclave has been working towards this project for two years. While the enclave isn't overpopulated now, it will be soon. This project is the third step in a long plan  to claim more living space as well as begin setting up some farm space. Rodriguez is negotiating but he has to hire the takers.

Competition: Nobody. The job is taking all the takers they can find.

Travel: 0 legs (from the enclave, more if the takers come in from afar.)

Site: The West Hill is a massive hotel and convention center located about a quarter mile from the enclave. The Hotel section is a 5 story monster of a building with adjoining “spa,” parking structure and big empty convention hall. The hall and spa have been cleared during phase 1 A wire fence reenforced with wood and metal has been built around the hotel proper as phase 2. Phase 3 is the job, four teams of takers will enter the hotel and after clearing the East stairwell, each will be given one floors to sweep. The fire doors in the stairwell will be secured from the outside until the enclave can confirm they're safe to open and the takers can go.

The hotel is laid out in an “L” shape with a bank of dead elevators in the middle. Each floor has12 rooms. Four “VIP Suites” on the shorter corridor and eight standard double beds down the other. There are unsecured internal stairways half-way down the longer hall next to a broken ice machine and a vending machine.

The “guest spa” a swimming pool,  hot tub, sauna, and steam room, all full of mold, and an open floor with derelict exorcize equipment. Right now it's got three fencemen from the enclave operating and recharging the drone they'll use to scout the floors after the takers call it done. They will offer no help to anyone for any reason.

The convention hall is mostly secured, it was gutted by a fire during The Crash and only the outer walls still stand, the unburned remains of the roof litter the broken concrete floor inside. There's nothing of value here beyond a pretty good sized area to convert to farming someday in phase 5.

The parking structure was essential to phase 2 when it was turned into a massive casualty harvesting center where loudspeakers drew casualties to the roof and several latents were harnessed up and suspended about 5 meters off the side. Later the enclave's latent population spent a week pulling bounty from the pile. It's how they've funded getting the fence up and hiring the takers.

The Takers will be on the 4th floor.
Complications:
Well, this is more an experiment in making a procedurally generated job site but.
About halfway through the job the taker crew on 5 goes vector and at least one comes screaming onto the Taker's floor. If the takers took time to secure the interior door they'll hear the vector bashing it down and have warning, if not they'll know when it comes screaming at them.

Rooms:

Let's try two methods:

First: Roll red and black as normal:
Critical failure: Aberrant, casualty ambush, corpses that look like dependents.
Failure: Casualties, maybe a scene of horror worth a self control check.
Success: There's something of use beyond casualties.
Critical Success: Mostly loot or at least no threats.

Second, mixing goodish and badish things: For each room roll red and black taking both results
Red:
1: Suicide: the room has people who opted out of the crash. the Market can choose to call for self control rolls.
2: Trapped: the door/entry hall is trapped, mostly with improvised tools, tripwires and rusty nails abound.
3: Casualties: there's a half mob in here.
4: Damaged, the room is empty likely because of structural damage. Attempting to do anything here is an athletics check to avoid bad floors, rabies infected guano etc.
5: Abbitor: the room went really bad, whoever was in here died ugly and all over the place, self control checks for detachment or stress.
6: Casualties: there's a full mob in here.
7: Spoiled loot: anything of value here went bad.
8: Goddam coworkers: this room becomes dangerous as smoke from fires and stray shots, or casualties knocked down a hole menace the takers.
9: Aberrant: the most likely are a small ganglia, the shuffled, or a recruiter coming out of a torpor.
10: Surprise casualties: the mob here is concealed somehow and you need an awareness check to notice them, otherwise it's like a jumpscare mob at 1 shamble coming out of closets and under beds.

Black:
1: Nothing of value.
2: Fringe loot: there's something in here that might be sellable if you squint at it. A bag of books for archivests maybe.
3: Last stand: somebody tried to hole up in here during the crash, they're dead now but a scavenging check can refresh a firearm, if there's casualties lower the number by 1.
4: Bounty: the ID's of the travelers were left here.
5: Stash: somebody's been Spidermanning up to the room to store contraband. The takers find one haul of loot that would still be looked down on.
6: Maybe something good? The room can be looted by standard rules.
7: Broken casualties: there's half a mob here (or a full depending on red) but they've been damaged enough that the takers can kill them at leisure.
8: Prewarned: the wall in here has been slightly damaged, takers can get a look at the next room without exposing themselves to significant danger.
9: A spy was here: somebody was spying on the mall, they left a small cache behind, takers can refresh one piece of gear. But it's been booby trapped with an IED. [Only once.]
10: Score: someone left something valuable here in a good supply. A d10 haul of marketable goods.

Aftermath: The takers will have to clear the fifth floor but they'll only need to do two rooms as the other two crews can come up to help them. Contract says the hotel has to be cleared before it's done. Otherwise Rodriguez pays up and they'll have a jobline open for looting construction supplies as well as escorting specialists responsible for cleansing the place.

A scam done during negotiation is not the same as the pre-work tasks you can do to get info on a job. A scam is part of the negotiation even if narratively it's done as a flashback that takes place before. Even playing with work/life balance shouldn't be able to get a Taker an extra scam somehow. Considering that a poor Leadership role means that some Takers might not be eligible to run a scam anyway, would this mean they'd potentially lose that action they gave up their vignette for? It just doesn't work within the rules.

When it comes to work/life, life = vignettes and work = look for a job/find price of a job/find competition for a job/details of a job. Takers give up one of those options to pursue some other venture.

That all said, if the group is just selling off haul they got from a single mission I generally just let them do it at the end of a contract. It's generally not worth the effort to micro manage emptying out the random bits of junk they scavenged, just pass the Networking roll and collect bounty. Unless they're setting up something bigger, like a full fledged estate sale with a few weeks' worth of scavenged goods - more of a flea market than a trip to the pawn shop - it's probably not important enough of an event to warrant taking away a work/life action.

Make the backer a company and their handlers find them jobs for them.
The handlers have different personalities and spots. You still get the chance to interact with the client from time to time but most times it's a low paying low risk shlub job found by the company where the real money comes from testing new kit and doing in the field reviews.

The takers then are the complication. Find a way to test this new piece of kit on camera.
They then have to put themselves in danger to earn above hazard pay.

It sounds like a Paranoia mechanic.

So I have this idea for a game where the crew has a backer. This backer is a taker centered gear developer in the Loss that buys, collects, and sells unique/pioneering tech and taker gear from both pre and post Crash.

One big thing about the group is how integrated this backer should be in their group. With it being economic horror, a lot of the economic problems may not come into as much play when you have a dedicated backer. How can I keep these as a more mutual business partnership than the players slowly gaining a friendship with their backer? How does one use the same negotiator for a large number of undertakings without dulling the whole weak and soft spots out over and over again.

Also, it would make sense to use these guys as a way to add some more... interesting gear into the game. Maybe a unique item or two that are prototypes that are nice gift spots, while they may also field test other gear (to varying degrees of effectiveness).

Carrying/using this prototype gear for field tests make you a Target for competitors, including roaches, as well as having a unique weapon or device. This can also be a way to get some extra bountt from the job.

All in all, I was wondering what kind of gear we might want to add. So far I have a few ideas, but I only have so many hours to scan spy movies and current day pioneering tech to see what might actually be useful.

I also have to figure out what kind of items they might have to get while on these missions.

A couple of my current proto type ideas:

Spider Dronkey: the spider dronkey has extra stabilizers and movement speed, the legs can separate into two sets of four legs, and it has a gyroscopic cart which can stay level no matter what the terrain. It is slightly smaller than a standard dronkey and only carries three haul, but has stealth servos as a standard package.

Shotgun Axe: the name says it all. Take it a shotgun, make it an axe. Kill C's without ever switching weapons. It uses charges as a shotgun or axe, but most are freshly made and in rather decent condition; so, unless they are found, they usually have sturdy built in.

Ranged Suppressin Delivery Pistol aka RSD: a small single shot handgun that fires Suppressin at short range as a needle with built in contact based injection. Basically a Suppressin epi-pen launcher.

Self Performing Tourniquet: A band, much like a belt or armband, that can save a limb by tightening as soon as fatal amounts of damage has been dealt to a body part other than the body or head. Results are promising, but not always reliable. Proven to not stop the spread of blight.

There is a picture of a young girl, pretty short, with ripped jeans, an orange and white striped tee, blonde dyed silver hair, tattoos down her right arm of blue butterflies and vines rapping around a knife,  and a silver necklace of an Irish cross. A taller, androgynous fellow has an arm around her shoulder, though the picture blurs most of the face. They are both smiling happily at the camera.

There is this petite girl who is about seventeen. Her name is NightBite and she lives in the Sierra Nevadas. She was working the corner in an enclave in the area. I decided to take her under my wing, because she needed the help.

My mistake.

We were on the way back from a major hit, felt like we found JOLS in his fucking underwear and beat the ever living shit out of him, when we get ambushed. About 8 in total, compared to our five. I think we have taken tougher crews, but point blank will make it difficult to come away without a scratch. I motion to NightBite to take the two on the left.

Then as I begin to make a move, she turns and stabs my brother Coyote in the neck. We've been working together for two months, and now she stabs my brother in the throat!

She tells the rest of us to lower our weapons and maybe we can get out alive. It's now three against nine and my latent via suppressin brother is about to go Vector at my feet.

Long story short: I put down my brother, then they stole everything we had on us.

After that as she duct taped a DDJ to my other brother Foxtrot (Coyote's twin), and Cigs and I had to take cover before I could disable the remote detonator. I refuse to use DDJ's on principal after seeing that.

I will pay anyone that brings me NightBite, alive in one piece, enough bounty to settle in a suburban home in Maine for the rest of their days. They can keep what and whoever is with her, but she is mine.

Last I heard she was in a bar fight in the Callous Falls area, but she got away with some Cartel runners.

NightBite is actually an immune. She prefers to use a crossbow with bolts dipped in Blight, and she has amassed a small number of guards.

She now is working an angle as a cartel runner's/pimp's prostitute, which means she can get some extra help from there, since she is worth more as a prostitute for latents than being sold out to StopLoss. She occasionally kills her clients for fun, and one or more may be tied up in her cab depending on the time of day or how recently she had a customer.

She plans to sell out the pimp the same way she sold out LordSkys

Depending on what is in the runner's truck, if the runner is at a way station, and how hard it is to get to NightBite this may be a simple find and retrieve to a damn near JOLS