24XX Zoopunk - One Shot

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World: This but in a Cyberpunk Future; I call it Zoopunk (though it went through multiple iterations)
System: Inner System Blues / 24XX by Jason T.

This here is an attempt at a short campaign, we're aiming for five or so sessions, up to ten tops, of weekly or bi-weekly play. This was the pilot episode, which is not necessarily part of the campaign's continuity, and followed a session zero of about four hours where we chatted about campaign expectations, character creations, and safety. Here is a summary of events (keeping records is 50% of my prep work) accompanied by commentaries about how things went.

Characters
- John "Doc" Shrew, a Shrew Stitcher
- Custard McInflames, a Cuttlefish Grifter
- Slide, a Chameleon Infiltrator
- and Yojimbo, a Wolf Hacker

What Happened
- They hadn't heard from Yojimbo in years, so when he called the crew to Skinners' to "talk", they knew something was up. Still, they went and caught up with their old buddy, who quickly brought business up: he needed the crew's help. A few weeks earlier he had stumbled upon an interesting piece of VR software during a datasteal on TransTechnica: an hyper realistic 19th century South Carolina manor, wherein he met a special someone - another hacker by the name of Abby. He wanted their help finding her while he tries to lay low and avoid TransTechnica's goons.

- Which is when a three-animals corporate hit squad hit the bar. A jackal in a silve-white suit spilled his drink on Yojimbo before trying to shoot him at point-blank, grazing his leg. Two others shot up the bar from a catwalk above with machineguns. We resolved that with some rolls: Yojimbo to defend against his attacker, trying to grapple at him. Slide getting the drop on one of the corps (the Bear). The rest was descriptive as the major threats were dealt with: from behind the bar, Custard and Doc took some pot shots to force the second upstairs shooter into cover. The crow (last hitman) managed to escape, John Shrew patched up Yojimbo's leg, Custard and Slide grabbed the jackal and everyone got the hell out of dodge before cops showed up.

- Back at HQ (an untidy break room with a bar and small alcove for Doc's medical chair and supplies), the table got quickly acquainted with Watts, their fixer (a 40s gay monitor lizard who I'm trying to do a posh british accent for, emphasis on trying), as well as Pudding, a possum street kid, eager to help if a little clumsy. Watts dug up some info on TransTechnica to get everyone up to speed while Doc examined Yojimbo. Then the crew asked a few questions to the goon, who, threatened with a gun, plead for his life and promised to find another line of work; he also revealed that TT was only after Yojimbo for the datasteal, at least that's all he knew about. Project Aurora, it was called. Oh, it also helped that Custard made use of some telepathic powers to check whether the Jackal was lying (he wasn't). Pudding cheerfully took away the corporate to dump them somewhere, blindfolded and tied but alive.

- At that point our hacker's player had to call it quits, though we kept going for another scene. By the end the infiltrator also had to sleep, and we wrapped things up with the grifter and stitcher.

- The group minus a hacker decided to take on TransTechnica directly, hoping to hit the downtown skyscrapper quickly enough to get the info they needed (Abby?) and leave. Short on time, I called for a quick montage, asking the players to describe how they pulled off the plan to get inside as it happened, rather than playing it out in the typical back and forth of Q&A. Essentially, Slide got some explosive shots for his scoped rifle and blew up some exec cars in Royal Plaza in Downtown, right in front of the TT skyscrapper. During the commotion, Doc Shrew and Custard got inside, and, guided by the hacker, found their way downstairs into the basement, then into a server room from which they downloaded the virtual reality file, in part corrupted since before their intrusion. They escaped without trouble and we wrapped up here, about three hours into a two hours intro session.

Thoughts After the Game
I'd say it went fairly well, I hit a roadblock inspiration-wise so I found some free adventure online and peppered a few additional details here and there, although it's a fairly linear adventure aiming more at showcasing bits of the world rather than opening up into a proper sandbox mission. Next time, we'll do some light roleplay around the debriefing to wrap up the case, and hopefully I'll have some prep to go into a more open-ended, player-driven approach. 

As it is often the case when I start running a game, I'm considering moving to different systems or going straight FKR soon-ish, possibly by the next session. I do like 24XX, but considering the way the table works and since it's not gonna be a procedural game (like, say, a dungeoncrawl), I think I'd probably benefit from going more towards diceless-ish play, though I'm not quite sure how to articulate why.

The anthro animals aspect didn't come up much, aside from visuals (at least in my head), or the one brawl between the jackal and wolf, where I thought to describe the jackal clawing and biting rather than just grabbing and punching.

Getting back into running games after a fairly long hiatus (for my habits) was a bit messy, but now that I got my fix, I'm excited to play again ASAP.