Literature / Shadowrun Storytime

Geppetto, Dervish, Bend, Wild Card.

Shadowrun Storytime is a long running series of text posts on 4chan's /tg/ board, originally starting as thread about playing Shadowrun with "That Guy". From there the threads continue to chronicle the crew of runners and their many adventures after "That Guy" leaves, and the threads change name from Shadowrun "That Guy" to Shadowrun Storytime. It can be read here.

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This work contains examples of:

• The Ace: Rodrigo Alvarez is described as being Aztechnology's premier company man, and one of the best runner-killers in the business. Drake Prime (Lofwyr's personal spec-ops unit) couldn't bag him after he crossed Saeder-Krupp during one of his runs; considering that screwing with S-K is generally considered suicide by most Shadowrunners, that speaks volumes as to his capabilities.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: The final job heavily implies that the recovered artifact is in fact the egg of Lofwyr and Hestaby's child.
• Adaptational Wimp: WildCat is downgraded from the Sioux Nation special forces to a fourth-rate PMC that's barely above the utterly incompetent HardCorps in terms of prestige.
• Affably Evil:
  • Geppetto is a Serial Killer, a sadist, and The Sociopath of the team. He's also the most overtly formal and polite, in no small part due to his position as the group's Face.
  • Wildcard is similarly cultured and formal, politely apologising for the inconvenience even as he informs a group of hostages that his team will be robbing them blind and orders them to remain silent under threat of being shot (with gel rounds, not that they'd know that).
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The Shadow Metaplanes Run opens with the Knight Errants coming after the team in their homes, making it clear that they could come for the team at any time.
  • The Final Run starts with the team meeting up in Dervish's fortress complex only to be interrupted by the appearance of "El Terminador", an Aztechnology combat cyborg hunting Locke. The team is forced to abandon Seattle and relocates to Italy.
• An Arm and a Leg: An unfortunate runner in Vegas tries to order a Troll security guard about, unaware that his (now-dead) colleague's mind-control spell has just run out. He promptly gets a leg torn off by the enraged guard and is dragged off for interrogation.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Geppetto loves using his magic to make his People Puppets torture/kill themselves and their families, just so he can relish their fear and misery while doing so.
  • When encountering a Cyberzombie, Bend notes that he can feel what's left of the poor bastard's soul, screaming and driven mad thanks to the unholy bindings keeping it trapped inside a rotting, cybered-up corpse.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Evo Biomedical's Seattle branch and 2D have a rather unpleasant history thanks to the former trying to dissect him and the latter replying by bombing Evo clinics with remote-controlled drones. The corporation serves as a major threat to (and a source of paranoia for) 2D in the early story, culminating in Evo sending a hit squad after him during the Jetblack Run that promptly gets wiped by the ghouls at John's compound. After this, they start to take more of a backseat as the game heads into the Two-Times Arc, aided by the previous department head being purged and replaced by one willing to call a truce with 2D.
  • Bend hates Aztechnology on a visceral, personal level due to the horrible things he saw them do while serving with the Tir Ghosts, with the death of his lover at Aztechnology's hands being a particularly sore point. Needless to say, he considers them his single biggest enemy.
• Ate His Gun: Geppetto's favorite trick involves puppeting someone's body via magic, then forcing them to shoot themself. One of the rival runners in the Trout Retrieval Run ends up on the receiving end of this, backed up by the power of an entire Black Lodge cell.
• Atrocious Alias: Dervish originally wanted the street name "Featherfoot" or "Featherstep". 2D called both names gay while their fixer flat out rejected it and suggested Dervish instead.
• Ax-Crazy: Gillette of the Nightengales is borderline cyberpsychotic, a side-effect of having most of her limbs and bones replaced with cybernetics. This is exploited by the team to goad her into essentially breaking the Nightengales as a group.
• Badass Bystander: Green, the Texan who was in a place robbed by the crew four separate times (They invited him one time on purpose though.)
• Babies Ever After: 2D, who has 3 "meat" kids and dozens of "cyber" ones.
• Back-Alley Doctor:
  • Doctor Laughsalot works out of the apartments where 2D's Halloweener friends live. It turns out he was still a medical resident at the time; after completing his residency, he changed his name and went legit.
  • John the Ghoul, who runs a clinic for ghouls and the occasional desperate Shadowrunner out in the Barrens. After Geppetto ends up looking like post-shooting 50 Cent (with less rapper and more dying), he oversees their medical care; later, he's responsible for saving Geppetto's life after the run that ended his career in the shadows.
  • Julia Greene is pretty skilled for a criminal cyberdoc, but performing brain surgery unassisted on a half-sedated Dervish was a step too far. When actual doctors take a scan of his brain, they're horrified and quickly put him on the emergency surgery list to fix things properly.
• Back from the Dead: Geppetto actually died for a couple days before coming back as a Banshee.
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: The fifth-rate HardCorps as encountered in Vegas is completely useless at their job. One member seems at least somewhat skeptical of 2D's sob story about Tank's death, but his boss buys the entire thing and quickly goes on a racist tangent.
• Badass Crew: 2D, Dervish, Geppetto, and Bend. Later it's Wild Card, Dervish, Locke, and Bend.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Geppetto and Wildcard prefer to wear nice suits while on the job. The whole team also tends to suit up when going to meet a VIP Johnson.
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn:
  • The original team of Dervish, 2D, and Trout. Trout is the Beauty, being a facial adept with high Charisma; 2D is the Brains, given his role as the team's hacker and unofficial rigger; and Dervish is the obvious Brawn, given his role as a Street Samurai.
  • Later team members also fill this. Dervish filled the Brawn role all the way through (being the only permanent member of the team), alongside Tank up until the player had to leave the table and his character got ganked by some old enemies. 2D, Bend, and Wild Card fill the Brains role, with Bend serving as the Only Sane Man and the other two as the team's hackers. Geppetto is the Beauty, being the team's face, until his retirement has him swapped out for Locke, similarly an elf mage, though one more fitting for the role as The Casanova.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Implied and played for laughs with the porn film v1ct1m wants 2D to find in exchange for help; while we're not shown what it involves, 2D is heard screaming "OH SHIT WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO THAT HORSE!?" from offscreen.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't meddle with Geppetto's house in a way that disrupts his usual routine. Pretty much the only reason he didn't go after 2D for turning his home into a playground for his sprite-children was 2D offering to pay half the rent.
  • Do not be related to Aztechnology around Bend. If you're lucky, he'll merely treat you with hostility; if not, you've got a pissed-off ex-Tir Ghost out for your blood.
  • Tweak absolutely hates having anyone but her touch her weapons. A faked schematic implying Gillette has been planning to graft her custom Ares Thunderbolt onto her own limb (coupled with Bend tampering with her drugs) is enough to make her outright homicidal.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Roughly the tone of the story, though the earliest runs are more A Lighter Shade of Black. While the team aren't exactly the most morally morally upstanding of people, their targets are usually various degrees of certifiable asshole (such as Two-Times, Mrs. Wellers, and Alvarez) or corrupt corporations that can generally absorb the hits dealt to them.
• Blood Magic: Locke leaves Aztechnology because he won't engage in this. Geppetto does it with both relish and a flair for artistic deaths.
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: 2D is the 21st-century version of this, using Data Bombs to fry out the brains of rival hackers. His mascot/avatar is a man with a blackpowder bomb for a head, wearing a bomber jacket. Prior to his feud with Evo Biomedical Seattle being resolved, he also loved using RC bombs and nitro-loaded walking dolls to blow their clinics and facilities up.
• Boom Head Shot: Dervish does this as payback to a team that did it to him first. Later on, the team embraces their professionalism and starts giving these out on downed opponents so that they stay down.
• Boring, but Practical: Bend's solution to nabbing an invisible stalker is to simply walk up to him and unleash half a clip of rubber bullets right to the head, then drag him into an unmarked van.
• Breaking the Fellowship: Once the Final Run is over, the team collectively retire from the Shadowrunning business and split up to pursue their own ambitions. They give Brianna her share of the job (all fifty million nuyen of it), share one last toast at the Faulty Bar, then leave as a group, with each member going in a different direction without a backward glance.
• Brick Joke:
  • Back when Shadowrun Storytime was still Shadowrun "That Guy" Storytime, Trout gets hired by "Mr. Jackson" to beat up a college student named Simon Berckiwitz, though Trout refuses to do so. Over 200 pages later, he reappears as a frat boy holding a party with the assistance of Adversary (Geppetto's Mentor Spirit,) and this time gives Dervish 50 Nuyen to, once again, beat up Simon Berckiwitz.
  • Terrence Jackson reappears once more, near the end of the story. He becomes Wildcard's roommate while he needs to lay low after the team's foray into the Shadow Metaplanes.
  • Early in their last run, the doujinshi about Dervish's adventures is brought up and the orc is asked if he really killed an oni with a motorcycle. Having not killed Taka, with a motorcycle or not, Dervish angrily says he should have. The epilogue reveals that Taka eventually meet this fate at the hands of "Little Texas", earning Dervish's eternal respect.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Dervish is playing bad cop while interrogating a talismonger. When he slides one of his cyberblades under the man's crotch as a threat, the talismonger shits himself in terror. Dervish is not happy at getting that on his blade.
• Broke Episode: The impromptu robbery of a Red Lobster early in the series was a result of the team realizing they had so little money that both Trout and Dervish were going to miss rent.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Locke is a miserable, paranoid wreck who tends to take abuse from both enemies and the rest of the party — particularly Bend, courtesy of his rather dark past with Aztechnology.
  • Trout spends most of his few runs being belittled by his teammates, beaten senseless by his enemies, and brutally mocked by basically everyone both in and out of universe. Considering his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, utter lack of usefulness to the team and general despicability as person, though, it's pretty deserved.
  • Captain Joseph Green keeps running into the team, with almost every encounter ending in him being beaten down, knocked senseless, or otherwise inconvenienced by the team. Finally subverted in the epilogue, as he becomes "Little Texas," Dervish's ARES TV co-star and Straight Man, along with gaining Dervish's respect for real for offing Taka with a motorbike.
• Burn the Orphanage: "Trout" became one of the most wanted men in Seattle after he shot up an orphanage. He thought he was fully justified since he was yakuza and the orphans's parents were all in the Mafia. Knight Errant and Lone Star begged to differ.
• Car Fu:
  • After finding out that the car they've been pursuing was a decoy and Mr. Wilkins daughter is still in enemy custody, an enraged 2D hacks the car and tries to ram it into a wall. When the enemy sammy bails, 2D turns the car around and tries to ram him. And then he starts hacking every other nearby car and sending them after the sammy as well.
  • Taka, the backstabbing oni crook from the Tokyo run, ends up being taken out by "Little Texas" in the epilogue when Texas rams him with a motorbike.
• Changing of the Guard: The end of the epilogue reveals it was actually the final volume of the doujinshi about Dervish's life. The person reading it is a new Shadowrunner about to head out with their team on a mission.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Trout spends a lot of time being treated by the street doc Doctor Laughsalot. This comes in handy much later when the party buys the blood Trout sold to the doc to cover his bills as part of the Trout Retrieval Run.
• Chemically-Induced Insanity: Geppetto's first job has the party selling a stolen ARES drug to a troll to see what it does. Apparently it induces homicidal insanity with a side of cannibalism, though the cocaine, morphine, and literal handfuls of pills might have contributed.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Trout. Good God above, Trout. The guy tried to sell out his running team after being spooked by a petty ganger, and more or less defaulted to selling out his teammates at the first sign of threat to him. Unsurprisingly, this gets him swiftly dealt with by the rest of the crew.
• Combat Medic: Locke's M.O. in the Aztechnology Special Forces. He's a commando mage, and his three biggest talents are using a Light Machine Gun, Summoning Spirits, and Healing Allies.
• Cold Sniper: Dervish becomes this for a bit after he has a ventilation shaft unwelcomely introduced to his brain via a sniper's bullet. While he gets better later, he can still revert to this given the right trigger.
• Colonel Badass: Locke, who was a 20-year special forces vet before being promoted to a cushy office job.
• Comedic Sociopathy: 2D only appreciates Matrix pranks when they're done to other people and involve ruining someone's life; he also provides a great deal of Black Comedy throughout the story due to this, such as the "making an enemy's cyberdick do loop-de-loops" incident or his efforts to wreck Zipper's life.
• Compelling Voice: Bend gets this, but it's more of a Compelling Suggestion that Mind Control. He can't make people do things against their nature, as he learns running from a horde of flesh-eating zombies
• Consummate Professional: The team gradually grows into this over time, as they exchange Trout for Bend, 2D for Wildcard, and Geppetto for Locke. That's not to say they don't still have their own peculiarities, of course.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: Happens when a character takes over another's role in the party.
  • Trout is an incompetent murderhobo who couldn't play his role as Infiltrator due to being one of the most wanted men in North America. Bend is a pacifist and supremely skilled stealth operative who, even as the team became internationally famous, managed to keep his details well-hidden.
  • 2D is a psychotic, disgusting troll who uses his natural Technomancer skills to control drones, eventually leaving Shadowrunning to become a corporate Spider. Wildcard is a cool professional who uses his extensive brain implants to focus on getaway driving supplemented with personal combat skills, retiring from Shadowrunning to embed himself ever deeper into the criminal world.
  • Geppetto is a disciple of Adversary who relishes in murder, blood magic, and goes into combat with little more than his spirits and a nice suit; he leaves running to become a full-time mafioso. Locke is a follower of the Aztec gods who defected to escape being forced into using blood magic, using a suit of combat armor and guns to supplement his magic; he leaves running to start a safe, legal career.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Geppetto asks 2D to help make a captured mook talk. 2D proceeds to hack the guy's enormous cyberpenis and install the control software for a tea cup ride, causing it to start doing loop-de-loops while sparking. The mook talks more to escape the near-terminal weirdness of the situation than anything.
• Cool Car: Wild Card's biggest delight. It's tricked out to go unreasonably fast. It's inspired by the car from Redline: Gang Warfare 2066.
• Corrupt Cop: The minor character Lieutenant Pete Fisher, who is referred to as being "utterly corrupt" and using wildly inappropriate levels of force on the job — much to the misfortune of Emily's attempted murderer, who gets his teeth kicked in on live ARES TV courtesy of this.
• The Corrupter: Geppetto steers the Italian mafia of Seattle into ever increasing levels of depravity after joining full-time.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: Ginsen, first encountered in Neo-Tokyo, is rather obviously a front due to the hardened mercenaries pretending to be desk jockeys while spouting generic corporate buzzwords. It's actually a Great Dragon-backed international black ops team.
• Crazy-Prepared: Everything about Two-Times, who obsessively has a backup for every element of an operation - two teams, two comms networks, etc. His location has to be found by getting three separate satellite uplinks and then storming his supervillain lair that's in an active warzone. And even then, he's prepared for that — Two Times is actually in Newfoundland, with the Bogota lair being a decoy intended to lure the pursuing shadowrunners into one place so that he can hit them with a Thor Shot and get away cleanly.
• The Creon: Jordan Formic, Bend's old boss, keeps choosing to remain in his position as Deputy Head of the Tir Ghosts despite being repeatedly offered promotion to the position of Head. His reason for doing to is because he prefers fieldwork to desk duty, and knows that becoming Head would prevent him from taking part in operations.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • The coked-out troll in Geppetto's first job keelhauled a Lone Star officer with his motorcycle. 2D likened it to a "dude cheese grater".
  • Geppetto uses his magic to slowly float an enemy into a nuclear spirit's body. Out of character, 2D's player notes it was probably the darkest moment in the game.
• Cyborg: There are quite a few cyborgs in Shadowrun Storytime, with most notable being Dervish "the Cybork" (combat-oriented augmentations for quick and efficient shanking) Wildcard (wired reflexes and enough augments for his already incredible brain to turn it into a supercomputer) and the two Willies, who had enough augmentations to turn them into crazy Cyberzombie.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: As seen with the Cyberzombie Willy, too many augments will literally leave you a soulless, insane killer.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Bend used to be a member of the Tir Ghosts, an elite black ops team working for the elven nation. He eventually quit after losing the love of his life to Aztechnology (known for practicing Blood Magic and Human Sacrifice) on an op, followed by a crisis of conscience during an operation to destabilize a rival nation.
• Darkest Africa: It's even worse off and fragmented in Shadowrun than in the present. The team heads to Lagos on a mission and it's a parade of murder, suffering, and barbarism.
• Dashing Hispanic: Locke, who has seduced a celebrity mercenary diva (no, really) and the Head Security Agent from the Department of Defense. He's also commented on as being very handsome.
• Deal with the Devil: After a Man Spirit's disobedience gets Dervish shot in the head, Geppetto strikes a deal with Adversary. In exchange for Adversary and his spirits' full cooperation with Geppetto, Adversary gets to possess Geppetto's body whenever he sleeps and get up to whatever mischief he wants (barring anything that would harm the team.)
• Deadly Nosebleed: A common result of being hit by Black ICE or a similar program; 2D himself is left bleeding heavily from the nose on two occasions of cybercombat, which is stated to indicate that he's dangerously close to flatlining.
• Death Glare: The other members of the team shoot Bend three filthy glares for commenting that they "did a good deed [protecting Granger]" after more or less getting swindled by Grinnin' Vinnie.
  Bend: (Looking at his three scowling teammates) Hey, at least we did a good deed?
  [Bend quickly shuts up as Geppetto, Wildcard, and Dervish glare at him.]
  Bend: ...I'm beginning to think that my Buddhist tenet of abandoning material possessions may conflict with my choice of profession.
• Defector from Decadence: Locke defected from Aztechology after he was promoted to the position of corporate security mage, due to his new colleagues casually telling him that the use of Blood Magic and Human Sacrifice was routine and expected at the level he was now working at.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Wildcard's forte, whether it be in a bank heist or with the team of runners. It's why he was sprung from prison and also why he decides to use his "wish" to found a criminal contact empire when he retires with his 52 million Nuyen reward.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?:
  • After the team finishes a nice dinner with one of their Mr. Johnsons, Wildcard reveals that the Mr. Johnson for that run is one of the Great Dragons, Schwartzkopf, giving them the job as a favor to another Great Dragon, Lofwyr.
  • After the team critically glitch a navigation roll during an escape, they end up on an isolated island occupied by a single old man in archaic clothing. He promptly introduces himself as the Great Dragon Ryumyo and more or less tells the team to get off his lawn, giving them a number of buff spells to speed them on their way.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: While Dervish is calling the Johnson to arrange a pick-up for his artefact, the Great Dragon Hestaby arrives and states she will take it. Dervish refuses because it's Johnson who decides where the artefact goes, even doing a mocking "on the phone" gesture.
  Hestaby: I am Hestaby.
  Dervish: I am Amerika-san.
• Didn't Think This Through: Geppetto tries to send a message to the team via a mind-controlled laborer. He didn't have a plan to deal with said laborer potentially shaking off the spell and then spreading the alert of a highly illegal spell being used on him. Geppetto is severely injured as a result and retires from running.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Zipper, a script-kiddie and wannabe Shadowrunner, vandalised 2D's commlink. His response was to do his level best to ruin Zipper's life, including straight-up trying to murder her via feedback databombs.
• Dirty Coward: Trout repeatedly buckles under the slightest pressure, twice offering to reveal all the details of his team when caught by an enemy and repeatedly refusing to do "dangerous" infiltration work.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: Bend is an Actual Pacifist so tries to get rid of an opposing runner team by threatening to kill them with a bomb if they don't back down. Unfortunately the team had read up on Bend and knew about his vows, so they call his bluff. He's not actually bluffing, and tearfully breaks his vow wiping out the team.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first two chapters are "Shadowrun That Guy Storytime" due to the presence of Trout. The fact that the rest of the team has to accept him despite his stunning incompetence and chronic betrayals makes this portion of the read surreal in comparison to what follows.
• Eldritch Location: The Shadow Metaplanes (referred to as "Hell" by Bend) don't exactly conform to the laws of geometry or reality, with rooms looping in on themselves and willpower being the only way to actually navigate.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: After completing the objective of the final job, Dervish receives a magical boost from Hestaby to clear the remaining enemies, making him even more lethal and letting him fly for a short time.
• Emergency Transformation: Geppetto takes several bullets to the chest and his only hope for treatment is a ghoul doctor, meaning he will be infected and become undead. As such he is turned by a banshee so he can at least appear human.
• Epic Fail: The GM sent Trout on what TwoDee refers to as "the milkiest of milk runs" - beating up a literal college nerd at the behest of a 19-year old Fratbro who's already half-drunk when Trout meets him. Trout still managed to catastrophically bungle it due to a last-minute loss of nerve followed by a natural 1 on a roll to deceive his client.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: For a lesser version of evil, the team is comprised of members Irish, Amerindian, Japanese, Scottish, and Italian. They also range from 20 to 50 years old have no problems working with women or metahuman races, and go to Africa and Asia with no problems.
• Escaped from the Lab:
  • 2D was captured by Evo for experimentation due to being a natural technomancer. He only escaped thanks to Ork Halloweeners raiding the facility where he was held. They still want to recapture him, both for further experimentation and to stop him bombing their buildings.
  • Dervish is implied to be a vat-grown supersoldier who either escaped or was dumped in Seattle. The exact details are never made clear, but by the end of the story it's revealed he was part of Aztechnology's Homegrown Warrior program. Many of the Willies encountered during the story contain cloned parts of his body.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For a given value of evil. The first (extremely black-hat) incarnation of the team ^* An amnesiac Orc with a heavily-implied murderous past and a host of comically illegal cybernetics, a sociopathic Serial Killer with a Satanic Archetype Mentor Spirit, a Psychopathic Manchild-slash-terrorist (cyber and otherwise), and a deranged spree killer who gunned down a bunch of orphans almost turned down a Yakuza contract to retrieve a rogue Bunraku puppet purely on moral grounds, agreeing to carry it out only because Trout blurted that they'd take the job.
• Evil Gloating: Two-Times indulges in a moment of this, mocking the team and monologuing about his Evil Plan once they find that his lair in Lagos is actually a decoy. Unfortunately for him, it promptly backfires hard as 2D back-hacks his communications and starts engaging him in cyberspace, ultimately leading to Two-Times death.
• Evil Plan: Two-Times' ultimate plan is to take over the global Ares satellite network, with the Shadowrunner teams he hired working to facilitate this and draw attention away from himself.
• The Face: Geppetto filled this role once the initial team settled in, generally handling negotiations with Johnsons and other high profile figures. After his retirement, Locke took over the role.
• Facial Horror: Geppetto barely survives a close encounter with law enforcement, coming out with half his face effectively gone. While the doctors are largely able to rebuild it, the area around one eye is mostly a mass of scar tissue and the eye itself is set differently from before.
• Famed In-Story:
  • Dervish becomes the most well-known runner in Seattle by the end of the campaign. On top of that, he gets a reality show about his life and acts as an Ares Megacorp "celebrity commando", with Ares financing his missions fighting crime around the world.
  • Geppetto is indicated to have become infamous both publicly and in the underworld after his retirement and coup of the Merlyns, being described as a real-world comic supervillain.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Wildcard faced a lot of discrimination while in the United Kingdom due to the country's antipathy toward metahumans. Part of the reason the Irish mafia had him go through as many plastic surgeries as he did was so that Wildcard could pass as a human.
  • Bend and Locke were heavily bullied during their childhoods for their metahuman features, leaving the former with crippling self-doubts as to his worth and indirectly causing the latter's violent aversion to Human Sacrifice after he accidentally killed a bully by summoning a flame spirit.
  • Despite Taka being an amoral criminal willing to commit any crime for profit, the Japanese corporations and Yakuza never recruited him due to their nation's disdain for metahumans of all stripes.
• The Fixer:
  • While the team does make use of foreign fixers when abroad, their most consistent one is Brianna McReary, the niece of a fixer in the Irish mafia who took over from her uncle when he died from lung cancer. She's the one who gets them almost every job after the original Ares run.
  • Taka serves as this to the team while in Tokyo, albeit a catastrophically incompetent and thoroughly unpleasant one. As Geppetto later uncovers, Taka was actually on a "fixer blacklist", meaning that he's essentially got zero actual sway over runners or jobs beyond those he can strongarm or fool into working with him.
• Flash Forward: The Final Run has several glimpses of the final climactic battle well before it ever occurs.
• For the Evulz: Geppetto, all the time. Highlights include killing a enemy running team one-by-one so they would know terror before they died, then stripping all of the Sole Survivors good memories away, causing the single darkest scene in the campaign through the use of a Nuclear Spirit, and being a serial killer in his spare time.
• Foreshadowing: On determining Two-Times is holed up in Bogota, Julienne muses he always suspected Greenland. Bogota was a Red Herring, as Two-Times was in his second bunker in Newfoundland.
• Fratbro: Terrence Jackson is an orc college student who the teams runs into periodically. He's constantly drunk, always watching porn on his AR shades, and is one beat-up nerd away from getting expelled.
• Friendly Enemy: During the fourth encounter of cop Joseph Green and Dervish, Green actually opens up about how he recently turned his life around and is on a second honeymoon, with Dervish giving sincere congratulations. Then the two proceed to beat the snot out of each other. After joining ARES, Dervish recruits Green to serve as the good cop to his bad cop.
• Gag Penis: An interrogation is sidetracked when the crew strips down their target and discovers he has an enormous cyberpenis that hangs down to his knees. Geppetto actually steps to the side at first glance because he fears there's a cybergun hidden in there. 2D gets him to talk by hacking the poor bastard's cyberpenis, then having it imitate a teacup ride.
  Geppetto: Who are you working penis? OH GOD DAMMIT.
• Gambit Pile Up:
  • The original Ares run, which kicked off the Two-Times Arc. The original conflict (the kidnapping the team was hired to solve) was between two Ares department heads, which is in turn part of a much larger conflict between two Ares factions. Two-Times hired a dozen running teams as part of the job, using their actions as a smokescreen to disguise his own gambit (compromising the global Ares network). Horizon was also running a "concerned citizen" act in the background, plastering footage of the kidnapping everywhere to make Ares look incompetent.
  • The final job, to a ridiculous extent. No less than four of the Great Dragons are involved, along with a handful of Corps and half a dozen movers and players. To wit, the team is hunting down a rogue Aztechnology shapeshifter in the Tir, who's trying to sell an extremely powerful magic artefact to Horizon for a huge amount of orichalcum while using four separate Shadowrunner teams to protect himself. The team is working for Schwartzkopf the Great Dragon, who is in turn acting as the Johnson for Lofwyr and Hestaby, both of whom want the artefact (heavily implied to be a dragon egg). Ginsen (revealed to be a black ops team payrolled by Sirrurg the Destroyer) is trying to hijack the delivery, steal the artefact, and screw Aztechnology over even harder in the process. Ares Macrotechnology and 2D also get involved under the excuse of protecting an Ares asset, with their actual goal being to exfiltrate a prototype next-generation super-soldier (A.K.A.: Dervish) and convince him to join Ares. For those struggling to keep track of everything, a rough and very spoilerific chart of all the gambits going on is here◊.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Evo Biomedical tac-teams wear rubber gloves, gas masks, and other HAZMAT gear in the field. Their CrashCart subsidiary's field troops are even referred to by this name.
• Glass Cannon: Geppetto, who doesn't even armor up in an active warzone. He's barely tougher than a regular human, but he's more than capable of tricks like sending hordes of murderous flame spirits after his enemies, using magic to puppet someone's body for his own purposes, or just plain causing you to explode through a powerbolt.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Geppetto tends to take some pretty brutal hits, but between his spirits and being a banshee with a Healing Factor, he can usually put himself back together. Until the final job where the damage is too extensive to repair.
• Goomba Stomp: During the Vegas run, 2D takes out a rival team's hacker by tracing his location through the system, breaking into his room, then jumping up and down on his head until he starts hearing snapping noises.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Trout liberally sprinkles bits of Japanese into his dialogue, much to the irritation of his teammates.
• Half-Breed Discrimination: Jonathan Red-Eagle's childhood in the Pueblo Corporate Council was marked by small instances of violence between him and his peers, implicitly caused by discrimination over Jonathan having only a small percentage of Native blood.
• Happily Married: 2D and his "ork juggalo girlfriend" are married by the end of the series. Bend and Emily end up marrying after the events of the series.
• Harmful Healing: Geppetto's eyelids were so badly lacerated that his healing factor kept sealing the flesh shut over the eye. The doctors had to cut an opening and keep the lids separated until they healed somewhat correctly.
• Healing Factor: Geppetto gains one after being turned into a Banshee, letting him regenerate from injuries much more quickly and regrow a few missing parts (teeth, for example.)
• Heel–Face Turn: After the Two-Times arc, 2D retires from shadowrunning and goes from being a black-hat hacker and member of Chaos Engine, a Matrix terrorist group, to being the Head Security Spider of Ares, one of the big ten corporations.
• He Knows Too Much: One of the team's field contacts gets executed by Wildcard during the final run due to this. Ginsen knew he was connected to the team, so him being snatched and mind-read by their mages would spill everything about their plans to them; in turn, this would put them into the unenviable position of playing hardball against a ruthless black ops team and a small army of Amazon mercenaries, both backed by the single meanest Great Dragon on earth.
• Hired Guns: This is what Shadowrunners are. A few times the team take "muscle" jobs instead of heist ones as well.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Two-Times indulging in a moment of Evil Gloating about his plans allows 2D to back-hack and engage in a cyberspace duel with him, ending in Two-Times' death when 2D retargets the Kill Sat he was aiming at the team to strike Two-Times' Newfoundland lair.
  • A law enforcement mage hit Geppetto with a Sleep spell, unaware of his deal with Adversary. Unsurprisingly, Adversary promptly slaughtered the mage and the rest of his team in short order at the cost of nearly killing Geppetto. Again.
  • As the epilogue reveals, Vulcan was eventually killed by his own security measures (specifically, the drop bears got loose and ate him.)
• Honest John's Dealership: Grinnin' Vinnie's Pawn Shop is a very unsubtle example of this. If the giant sign reading "Our prices are so low they're Criminal!" and armed mobster-guards outside didn't give it away, Vinnie's sheer Blatant Lies to the team about "only trading in reputable goods," while gleefully examining a pile of stolen jewellery on his desk will.
• Honor Among Thieves:
  • The team will steal, they'll assassinate, they'll bump off rivals and work with the literal devil. They still have some standards, especially after Geppetto retires from the group. After they're tricked into handing a couple Ares kids to a Nightmare, the team agrees to go into the Shadow Metaplanes and hunt the bastard down partly to make up for their mistake.
  • The UCAS has an informal agreement among Shadowrunners that means they won't screw each other over for no reason. The running team out for Tank's head choose to non-fatally incapacitate Geppetto, 2D, and Dervish when they execute Tank for this reason; they weren't involved in his feud beyond hiring Tank on. In return, 2D and their hacker later work to cover each other by erasing the killer team from the murder scene's CCTV footage and framing Tank as a criminal intending to do terrible things to 2D.
• Hypocritical Humour: Just before the Trout run begins Bend (a Buddhist who has committed to a stable relationship with his girlfriend,) decides to indulge with the rest of the team at Dante's Inferno and ends up in Lust. He wakes up on a heart-shaped bed, naked except for his goggles with no less than eight prostitutes around him, upon which he remarks:
  Bend: I may have strayed from the path a little.
• I Do Not Drink Wine: As a banshee, Geppetto eats only human flesh, blood, and souls. He can force himself to eat normal human food to pass as normal in meetings, but has to fight his gag reflex.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: When a furious Taka calls the party after his bar is destroyed by an army of drones, Geppetto admits he's amazed Taka escaped the drones and spirits. Taka angrily points out he hadn't mentioned the fire spirits which set the rubble on fire.
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: Schwartzkopf tells Dervish to stop speculating about the relationship between Lofwyr and Hestaby or he'll be eaten.
• Identity Amnesia: Dervish wakes up in Seattle with no memories, no clues to his identity, and (almost) nothing but the clothes on his back. A handful of clues are dropped as to his identity, before the last few runs and epilogue reveal it in full.
• Inadvertent Entrance Cue: During Locke's initiation robbery, Bend pauses mid-looting to ask if they remembered to turn off the silent alarm. A SWAT van immediately drives through a nearby wall.
• Informed Ability: Trout's backstory and stats cast him as a master spy and gunfighter. Due to his player's incompetence and cowardice, Trout completely bungles both roles.
• Inspirational Martyr: Jonathan Riese, a liberal political activist, tries to turn his political partner and girlfriend into one. Luckily for her (and unluckily for Riese), her brother hires the team to protect her due to multiple death threats already sent to her.
• Jerkass:
  • Taka. He acts like a massive asshole toward them team and repeatedly screws them out of their pay, using them to do his work while threatening to delete the intel they need should they complain at all. The crowning moment of dickery comes where he almost gets Bend killed because the intel was nearly a decade out of date, prompting the team to screw him over in return.
  • 2D is a self-admitted asshole with shades of Psychopathic Manchild, as his love of deadly programs and massively disproportionate response to Zipper's prank may indicate. That said, he does have a number of overt Pet the Dog moments and does indeed have moments of conscience or moral behaviour.
• Jizzed in My Pants: 2D does this three times during the campaign when he mentally connects to satellites directing massive amounts of net traffic. 2D barely seems to notice; nobody else is happy about this.
• Kayfabe: After getting drugged and conscripted for an underground fighting ring, Dervish becomes part of a "grudge" storyline between himself and another fighter.
• Keeping the Handicap: Dervish's Sensei is blind despite having had years to get cybernetic replacements. Dervish accurately surmises it's just so he can tell the story about how Aztech blinded him but it just made him more powerful.
• Kick Them While They Are Down:
  • 2D sells Trout out to Lone Star after Captain Green shoots him several times and leaves him bleeding in the street. This is Justified by Trout's status as The Load and the massive security liability he posed to the team after that incident.
  • Rosie's team are dead to a member, and she poses no real threat to the team. Geppetto still decides to strip all her happy memories away as a final act of cruelty, rather than outright finishing her off.
• Kill Sat: Two-Times manages to get his hands on an Ares Thor Shot, which he intends to use to wipe the team out and cover his tracks. He didn't count on 2D backhacking his comms, then very narrowly managing to seize control of the Thor Shot and use it against him.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Geppetto uses his black magic to strip all the good memories from the Sole Survivor of an enemy running team, courtesy of a bit of inspiration from Dervish.
• The Last Dance: In the epilogue, Sensei was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition. At his request, he was air-dropped into the Amazonian front, naked and carrying only a single knife, just to see how long he could last.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • Brianna spreads a rumor that a UO complex is looking to send out couriers due to the team's failed infiltration. Another fixer sees a potential payday and sends another team to try and intercept the couriers. UO assumes it's the same team and lowers its guard after killing them.
  • To take down the Nightingales, the team has Locke, Dervish, and Wildcat flirt with their members to distract them and figure out their weaknesses - namely, Twitch's violent attachment to her guns and Gillette's cyberpsychosis. Bend then plants fabricated schematics for grafting Tweak's prized guns onto Gillette's arms in their room and tampers with the former's drugs. The resultant cyberpsychotic breakdown and brawl sees Tweak dead, Gillette in custody, and Echo being convinced to go legit by Bend.
• The Load: Trout barely contributes anything to the team, refuses to infiltrate (his role in the team) on the grounds of it being "too dangerous", and tries to backstab them at the drop of a hat to get himself out of trouble. Furthermore, his massive bounty and Criminal SIN - the latter of which broadcasts his identity and bounty to literally every cop within several blocks wherever he goes - is a massive albatross around their necks ^note This being particularly pronounced during their restaurant robbery, where his known nature as a child killer prompts a Lone Star officer to immediately open fire on them and send the whole plan to hell. This in turn leads to Trout bleeding everywhere and becoming an even bigger liability, as a ritual magician could easily pick up some of that blood and then kill (or worse) Trout at literally any point in any later run so long as he remained on the team. Unsurprisingly, him being taken out by Lone Star (with some help from 2D) is where the story starts to change its tone and focus.
• The Lost Lenore: Bend and another Tir-spy were deeply in love when she was captured and brutally executed by Aztechnology, leading to his hatred of the corporation.
• Ludicrous Speed: Locke order his force 8 guidance spirits to boost the speed of Wildcard's already insanely fast car. The speed boost is multiplicative, meaning the car not only breaks the sound barrier but the team has to levitate it and go airborne. The team gets badly rattled and need to crawl out of the car after it finally touches down again.
• MacGuffin: An unidentified "artifact" is the target of the final run, with every party involved competing to acquire it. It's never confirmed but heavily implied to be a dragon egg.
• Made of Iron: Dervish, who survives getting shot in the head with a sniper rifle. Locke, and Bend are no slouches either.
• Magic Knight: Locke, who goes into battle in full armor while wielding a light machine gun. His style of magic is explicitly based on being a soldier though, and he advanced to the rank of Colonel Badass in the Aztlan (Mexican) Special Forces.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: Wildcard underwent plastic surgery to make him appear to be a human rather than an orc. While successful, additional operations over the years have left his face with a slightly unnatural appearance.
• Malevolent Masked Man: Wildcard wears a clown mask on the job.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Geppetto, who dresses in imported bespoke European suits; and Wild Card who likes opera.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: While 2D is not all that girly, he is the most prone to running away from direct confrontation in meatspace, while his orc juggalo girlfriend is far more... Assertive.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!":
  • 2D and Dervish both react this way when they figure out they've been geeking an Ares-sponsored running team, while working for an Ares-affiliated Johnson.
  • The entire team has a moment of utter terror when they realise they've been hired by not one, but two Great Dragons. It only mounts as they find out that they're running against Sirrurg the Destroyer, one of the most vicious Great Dragons on earth, and at least two major megacorporations.
  • The group collectively bricks it when the old man they encountered on an island reveals that he's actually Ryumyo the Great Dragon and they're trespassing on his property.
• Master of Illusion: Bend uses this in a surprisingly creative way: he entreats another runner group to call it quits and just leave peacefully with their lives. When they shoot his illusionary double, he reconciles himself to having to kill them and breaks his vow of pacifism.
• Money Is Not Power: When the team finally corners Alvarez during the final run, he tries to plead that he'll pay them double what their Johnson is. Wildcard's response is hardly surprising.
  Wildcard: Sorry, mate. You fucked with Lofwyr.
• Mook Horror Show: The Final Run has a few Flash Forwards from the point of view of the team's opponents during the climactic battle, each one ending with the opponents dying horribly.
• More Dakka: Locke and his Light Machine Gun, which he realistically uses with a bipod and has been used to destroy vehicles.
• The Most Wanted:
  • Trout going rogue to shoot up an orphanage gets him marked as a deranged spree killer, and he spends most of his time on the party dodging Knight Errant cops.
  • Aztechnology has a massive bounty on Locke's head due to his decision to defect and go Shadowrunner. By the final run, the company is plastering his face and bounty on every one of their billboards across North America.
• Moving the Goalposts: Taka pulls this on the team and gets away with it because he can get the intel they need. He demands they pull a job as payment, then immediately finds an excuse to say it didn't count so he can give them another one. When they complete that job, he refuses to give them the full intel unless they do a third job for him in the middle of their already dangerous mission.
• Mugging the Monster: Zipper, a young dwarf hacker, unknowingly breaks into and starts vandalizing 2D's commlink. 2D, a Chaos Engine member and black hat hacker, proceeds to flip his shit and ruin her life.
• Mysterious Past: Dervish woke up in a dumpster prior to the campaign, without a single damn clue who he is or why he ended up there. A few hints as to his origins are dropped throughout the campaign, with the the Shadow Metaplanes run, the last encounter with the second Willy, and the epilogue finally revealing the majority of his past: he was a citizen of the PCC, used as a test subject for years by the fledgling nation due to his unique genetic structure. Aztechnology eventually launched a strike on the facility to claim him and used him as a testbed for their Homegrown Warrior programme, only for Dervish to escape sometime later.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Dervish, the Rocket Ork. Enough so that not messing with him is one of the rules the Ancients (an incredibly powerful gang) has to follow.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Trout was simultaneously a member of both the Texan Lone Star PMC and the Yakuza. He was also a ninja, a facial sculpt adept, and a master gunfighter.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Geppetto uses his Man Spirit to convince two Knight Errant super-cops to beat an enemy sammy within an inch of his life. When they start to leave, he sends them back to cripple his cyberlegs then toss him in a dumpster.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: An Adversary-possessed Geppetto more or less states this during the Universal Omnitech run; since Geppetto's head is currently twisted about 180 degrees in the wrong direction and half his face is missing, the former's Demonic Possession is basically the only thing keeping him alive.
• Obsessively Organized: Geppetto keeps his house carefully organised and is obsessed with murder, with most of his negative qualities being related to (in TwoDee's words) "obsessive-compulsive stuff of the type that serial killers are prone to."
• Occidental Otaku: To get some privacy while hacking a corp network in Neo-Tokyo, 2D goes to a maid bar acting like the worst variant of this trope. He wears a kimono with nothing underneath it, carries an anime love pillow and bag of truly filthy hentai, and speak-screams in the most broken, weeaboo Japanese he can muster.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Bend actually deciding to kill someone is treated as a major dramatic moment on both occasions it happens — in the case of the building-destroying explosion he sets off at the end of the Final Run, TwoDee reveals he actually bought off the Pacifist trait with karma to emphasise the dramatic nature of the moment.
• Odd Friendship: The team strikes up a friendship with the sasquatches they saved from the berserk troll during Geppetto's first run.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Gillette very, very messily decapitates Tweak during her cyberpsychotic breakdown. Since her blade wedges below the skull on the first strike, she ends up using her weight to lever the blade through what's left of her victim's throat, showering the room in gore while their head goes flying off.
  • A Flash Forward through the eyes of a mook ends when Dervish twists his head off like a bottlecap.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Doctor Laughsalot's reaction to hearing the word "Horizon," in connection to Shadowrunners needing medical aid is to swear, shout he doesn't know them, and hang up.
  • Joy, the team's target in the Vegas arc, is visibly terrified when the troll guard who crippled him informs him that his team was unknowingly trying to steal Hestaby's magical focus.
• Old Master: Sensei is an elderly orc who trains Dervish to world-class skill in the vaunted martial art of cyborg prison shanking. When Dervish gets old, he takes on his own students in honor of Sensei.
• One Last Job:
  • Bend promises his girlfriend that he'll get out of the Shadowrunning business soon, he just needs to push for one last big score so he'll have enough funds to retire on.
  • The team realizes partway through the Final Run that it's going to end their Shadowrunning career one way or another, as they'll have made too many enemies for future Johnsons to risk hiring them. Their current employer agrees to bump the payout enough to cover their retirement.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Averted Trope. Despite being a staple trope of Shadowrunners, who operate only by street name and regularly buy and burn through several aliases, we do learn the name of every one of the team. Also strongly averted by Trout, who is known by his real name and is constantly broadcasting it because he's a wanted criminal.
• Overt Operative:
  • Shadowrunners are supposed to keep a low profile to avoid the heat from their jobs following back to their personal lives. Dervish, whose personal life consists of fighting mutants in a bombed out wasteland, doesn't bother and by the the end of the campaign is internationally famous with a doujinshi about his adventures.
  • Trout is meant to be the infiltrator of the team, which entails keeping a low profile during the job so he can sneak around. In practice his Criminal SIN's constant broadcasting, nature as a braggart, and utter cowardice turn him into this.
  • The Nightengales are a team of Shadowrunners who have starred in a reality tridshow and released two music albums. It's apparently typical for Vegas 'runners to double dip on profits using the perceived glamour of their occupation. This ends up screwing the team over as it also means all of their weaknesses are public information.
• Pacifist Run: Bend's officially a pacifist and consequentially prefers to operate this way. It helps that he's basically a magical Sam Fisher. Spectacularly subverted during the Final Run, where he blows up a building with a rival Shadowrunning team inside while under extreme duress.
• The Paranoiac: Vulcan, the Merlyns' fetish trader, is paranoid even by Shadowrunner standards. When Geppetto gets sent to pick up a fetish from him, Vulcan trains a dozen high-calibre gun turrets on him and repeatedly threatens to kill him over the slightest things seeming 'off' (like Geppetto being HMHVV-infected, even though the Merlyns warned him in advance), all while rambling about the risk that Geppetto is "one of them."
• Pass Fail: Wildcard is a Scottish orc and as such faced a lot of racism in the United Kingdom. The mafia arranged for him to undergo extensive plastic surgery so he could pass as a human when he joined up.
• People Jars: According to Locke, Aztechnology puts the members of its Homegrown Warrior Program into these to install their cyberware. This is also the origin of the Cyberzombie Willie, who was essentially assembled from several tank-grown organs and body parts.
• People Puppets: Geppetto, who uses this to be a Serial Killer. His trademark technique is combining this with Ate His Gun, while the victim is fully conscious but helpless to stop it.
• Pet the Dog: The team starts off very black hat, but when Tank's sister is left homeless due to a failed hit they all come together to rebuild the house.
  2D, Dervish, and Geppetto would give this little girl a place to live, goddamn it, or they weren’t morally questionable mercenaries. Because, you see, if they didn’t do this, they’d just be pure evil, not questionable.
• Pink Mist: A full-body variation of this happens when Dervish hits an enemy mage at full speed with his blades out. While the scene is only briefly described, it's indicated that the mage more or less ended up being completely pulverised by the force Dervish hit them with.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Trout was the first Infiltrator of the team, but refused to do any real infiltration work because it was quote-unquote "too dangerous".
• Police Brutality:
  • Geppetto uses a Man Spirit to convince two Knight Errant super-cops to beat an enemy sammy into the pavement, reassuring them the entire time that nobody's going to care.
  • Lieutenant Pete Fisher is noted for using "wildly inappropriate" levels of force. This is demonstrated when he's filmed kicking in a would-be killer's teeth live on ARES TV.
• Properly Paranoid: It might be easier to list the characters who AREN'T this trope. Special mention goes to Sensei though, who lives in an irradiated hellhole constantly attacked by zombies, gangs, mutants, and sometimes corporate kill squads.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Geppetto, who uses this enough that it's basically his signature move. Outside of Shadowrunning, this is his particular flavor of serial killing.
• Put on a Bus: Trout gets captured by Knight Errant and flung into prison after the events of the second thread. He shows back up as part of the prelude to the team's first high-level corporate run, and gets a quick mention in the epilogue as being the test subject of a failed corporate brainwashing program.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Locke whispers "Ares Macrotechnology, you American cocksuckers," moments before being whisked away from the bombing run that killed the rest of his original team.
  • Brianna McReary drops a thunderous one when she's given her cut for the Final Run — fifty million nuyen's worth of orichalcum.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo:
  • Vinnie "The Grin" Valachi, the swindling guido and pawnbroker from the Granger run, is actually a previous player character of TwoDee's from a campaign before the one that Shadowrun Storytime covers.
  • 2D and Geppetto both show up from time to time after leaving the team, with the former having a significant supporting role during the Final Run.
  • One run focuses entirely on the team rescuing the previous player character Trout. The remaining members who know him are not happy about this cameo.
• Private Military Contractors:
  • Several are encountered by the team over their runs, either as antagonists or grudging allies/clients.
  • Ares Firewatch: The best of the best, multinational commandos analogous to magically-active Navy SEALs. Them showing up in a 'run is usually a sign of heavy Ares involvement, hence why Firewatch escorting a plane containing the kidnappers of an Ares manager's daughter (who the team have been hired to rescue) prompts such a massive Oh, Crap! from 2D and the team; they later re-appear during the Final Run to extract Dervish and convince him to join Ares.
  • Knight Errant: The military footsoldiers of Ares, from whom Firewatch recruits. They're the main cop corp in Seattle, and one of the most commonly encountered by the team — whether as reluctant clients (during the Shadow Metaplanes run) or as enemies due to guarding the team's targets.
  • Lone Star: The crappy, corrupt version of Knight Errant, with worse training and equipment. Trout used to be a member of them (along with the Yakuza) before he turned to the Shadows, with the company subsequently hunting him down due to the massive bounty on his head. Captain Joseph Green also started out as a member of them, being the one to (semi-directly) take out Trout; he later quit after one too many encounters with the team only to sign up with Knight Errant.
  • HardCorps: The fifth-rate and worst PMC, encountered during the Vegas arc. They mostly serve as comic relief with their "investigation" of Tank's death and hilarious incompetence.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Tank's death was the result of this — his player was forced to drop out of the plot due to family obligations of the "Games are a waste of time, I'm banning you from playing them so you can spend more FAMILY TIME with us" variety, but the GM refused to GMPC him for the rest of the Two-Times Arc due to its length. This meant he had to be either Put on a Bus or killed off, and the running team after Tank's head provided a perfect way of removing him from play.
• Red Herring: Two-Times' Bogota lair is a well-defended decoy; he's actually in Newfoundland, and had set the Bogota facility up from the start as a trap.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: The team starts off extremely black hat, with their first job being to murder an innocent woman to send a message to her lover and it only gets worse when Geppetto joins. The players made a conscious decision to lean more "pink mohawk" later on, swapping out their two most overtly vile characters for more moral and amusing alternatives, and the story's tone shifts to match.
• Ritual Magic: Comes up in a few runs. As seen in the Trout Run, it requires DNA from the target (such as blood, hair, or bone) to be gathered and placed somewhere such as an altar, after which the mage or mages involves in the ritual gather, pool their magical power together and collectively cast their spell. The ritual allows the casters to mind-control or kill their targets from halfway across Seattle, or - in the case of Gepetto and the Seattle Black Lodge, who summon spirits to supplement the ritual - cast ridiculously high-power spells that can wipe an entire Shadowrunner team from miles away.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: As soon as Dervish gets out of the hospital after being shot in the head with a sniper rifle, he decides to get even. He quickly tracks down the running team responsible and returns the favour to their sniper, before taking out their mages and a couple others. It takes 2D figuring out that they've been geeking another Ares-sponsored running team coupled with Firewatch showing up in force to make Dervish back down.
• Satanic Archetype: True to form, The Adversary is this. He works out a deal to possess Geppetto for a few hours a day just for a chance to cause suffering and pain, such as showing up at a frat party to "facilitate a truly epic amount of date rape" or re-enacting the death of St. Peter with a local deacon.
• Scare 'Em Straight:
  • Discussed and subverted. Jordan Formic doesn't want his niece scared off becoming a Shadowrunner; he wants the team to show her the ropes while disabusing her of the notion that it's as glamorous as Shadowrun-Hollywood depicts it to be. This is to ensure she can be fast-tracked into the Tir Ghosts when she becomes of age.
  • Bend more or less pulls this on Echo during the Final Run, on account of her youth (being a teenage Shadowrunner.) After engineering the breakdown and violent destruction of her team, he advises her to go back into legit business — a hint she's heavily implied to have taken to heart.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • After an extraction gone wrong ends up with Geppetto on the brink of death (again) partway through, with the method used to heal him leaving cerebral fluid permanently leaking from his eye, he quits from the team to become a full-time mafia member.
  • Locke chose to defect from Aztechnology when his bosses ordered him to perform a ritual sacrifice, something he opposed on a fundamental level.
  • Bend was originally a Tir infiltrator but developed severe doubts about the Princes as it became clear the nation couldn't hope to survive in a modern economy. After being sent to kill yet another liberal politician to buy the Princes a few more years, he abandoned the mission and quit in disgust.
  • After witnessing one of her teammates go full cyberpsycho and brutally decapitate the other, Echo decides (with some prompting from Bend) to head back to Los Angeles and get the hell out of the Shadowrunning business in favour of her legit music career.
• Sell-Out:
  • 2D, hacker and cyberterrorist, becomes a corporate security chief when his wife drops the bomb.
  • Dervish leaves the business for a celebrity position with Ares.
• Serial Killer: In his personal life, Geppetto is secretly a serial killer. His particular MO is making his victims commit suicide via mental manipulation.
• Serious Business: The initiation ritual for the team begins with a member delivering a manifesto on the evils of corporatism and how they must strike back in an act of revolution... by robbing a mid-range family restaurant.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Dante's Inferno is a seven (technically nine) floor club with seven levels themed around one of the sins (and another two for particularly elite clients.) Knowing that the next job (their first triple-A run) might be their last, each team member promptly decides to indulge in one, resulting in a night of mayhem for each.
• The Shadow Knows: More accurate to say that the Shadow Metaplane itself knows and changes your form to match. When inside of it, Wildcard looks like a 1920s gangster with a porcelain face, Locke looks like an anthropomorphic Aztec temple, Bend looks like a cross between Sam Fischer and James Bond, and Dervish looks like... Dervish.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: Bend has this problem after developing his shapeshifting. He tends to favor a female kangaroo form as he can store his gear in the pouch.
• Shed Armor, Gain Speed: Dervish has gone into serious fights wearing his mini-mech armor for much of the series until the final battle where he doesn't have time to gear up if he wants to save his team. Without the armor weighing him down, Dervish proves to be so fast that his enemies can barely keep eyes on him and he's able to dodge bullets.
• Shoot the Mage First: Known in Shadowrun as "geek the mage first", in part because they can heal, and in part because of Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. They tend to be Glass Cannons as well.
• Shout-Out: Wild Card is a bank robber who wears a clown mask.
• Significant Name Shift: "DeadMan" ends up being referred to as Trout by character and narration alike after his second run sees him so badly-injured by a coked-up troll that he winds up flopping around like a dying fish, representing the team's increasing lack of respect for him and his incompetence.
• Simple, yet Opulent: On learning their last Johnson is old-school, the team decides to skip on the more ostentatious embellishments of modern suits in favor of a traditional "less is more" high-end tailor.
• Slipping a Mickey: Despite knowing better, Dervish gets dared into downing a drugged drink while in Africa and wakes up almost naked and chained in a basement. His captor agrees it was a cheap trick, but Dervish still fell for it. And the booze wasn't even any good.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Taka operates out of a dingy little bar and is officially on Tokyo's fixer blacklist, but he still acts like he's one of the biggest players in town.
• Smug Snake: Taka, the team's temporary Fixer during the Tokyo run. The guy repeatedly forces the team to do his dirty work under threat of deleting vital info for their run, all while treating the group like something scraped off his shoe. This bites him in the ass hard after bad intel and maltreatment cause Bend to be badly injured on a run against Shiawase, as an enraged 2D and Geppetto proceed to burn down his bar, cripple his operations, and finally leave him for the police to deal with.
• Sole Survivor:
  • Zipper is eventually revealed to have been part of a Shadowrunner team previously hired by Darius, and was the only member to survive the Horizon retrieval squads.
  • Rosie is the only member of the team targeted by Geppetto and the Black Lodge who survives, but solely because they decide wiping her mind is a cruel enough.
  • Locke lost the rest of his squad to an Ares bombing run during a mission, surviving only because his Guidance Spirit teleported him out of the battlefield before the bombs hit.
• Split Personality: Dervish's cybernetics and severe brain damage combined to give Dervish a rarely seen split personality. Said personality is a cold, ruthless killer with exceptional sniping skills who still considers himself part of the team. Dervish specifically triggers this personality entering the Shadow Metaplane because its sociopathic tendencies mean it has fewer emotions to exploit.
• Squee: 2D is beyond delighted when they meet a kitsune schoolgirl who manages to hit nearly every anime stereotype.
  2D: JAPAN IS EVERYTHING I DREAMED IT WOULD BE, GUYS.
  Geppetto: Oh my god, we need to end this job quick before 2D creams himself in public again.
• Stable Timeloop: The party is sent into the Shadow Metaplanes by the Knight Errants. After they complete the job, Locke's guidance spirits drop them one day in the past inside the Knight Errant base. They quickly yell at some nearby guards to arrest them in the next day and then hide to avoid any further time travel shenanigans.
• Summon Magic: One of Locke's staple techniques. He favors flame spirits.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Jozie informs 2D that she's pregnant just before the team embarks on the Lagos run. It's what prompts 2D, the otherwise enthusiastic Shadowrunner and cyberterrorist, to go legit as a corporate security chief.
• Tears of Blood:
  • A common sign of a Technomancer being badly injured in cyberspace combat. 2D himself starts bleeding from the tear ducts after Two-Times briefly flatlines him during their battle in an ARES satellite.
  • Geppetto is left with cerebrospinal fluid permanently leaking out of one eye after a particularly severe instance of Facial Horror and a bit of back-alley surgery.
• Technical Pacifist: Bend takes up a vow of pacifism, namely that he will not personally kill anyone. He can however enable other people to do the killing on his behalf and is more than ready to apply non-lethal violence personally. He eventually (though very unwillingly) breaks his vow during the final run.
• Technopath: 2D and Echo. The proper term is "Technomancer" though.
• Terminator Impersonator: "El Terminador", a full-body combat cyborg sent by Aztechnology to eliminate Locke. It shows up dressed in biker leathers, rides a motorcycle, and never stops pursuing them even as its fake skin is blasted off, exposing the metallic monster beneath.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • 2D, furious at Taka for his crap jobs and intel, sends a hijacked army of corp drones to demolish his bar. Geppetto, not knowing about this, sent his fire spirits to burn said bar to the ground.
  • During the early stages of the Trout run, the team finds out there's a rival Shadowrunner team against them. Geppetto's response is to enlist the aid of a Black Lodge cell, who promptly flatline the entire enemy team in minutes through the use of several ridiculously high-power spells. Highlights include causing their muscle's head to explode like a block of C4, forcing the mage to kill himself, and finally blowing the whole team up with an overclocked Powerball.
  • When you just have to be sure, try using enough C4 to remove the entire top floor of a building, as Bend's actions during the final run can attest to.
  • After finally capturing the shapeshifter who pissed off Lofwyr, Wildcard and Locke reduce him to a puddle with 145 rounds of explosive ammunition.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Locke ends up becoming this at Wildcard's house and later Dervish's fortress as he's too paranoid to get his own place. Wildcard gets so frustrated that he changes his identity and moves into a frat house to get away from the elf.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: 2D makes heavy use of feedback databombs during cybercombat, and used his rigging skills in meatspace to rig remote controlled cars with bombs to blow up Evo Biomedical clinics prior to the campaign.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: Dervish takes a bullet to the brain which triggers his sociopathic split personality. He actually leaves the bullet there for quite some time before getting it removed by a street doc who slaps in some filler vat-grown grey matter. When he visits an actual hospital, the doctors respond with appropriate shock.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Yes, Trout, you should certainly try repeatedly backstabbing your own running team while also being one of the most wanted men in America with a SIN that constantly broadcasts the fact that you're an unstable, extremely-wanted criminal to the world. Unsurprisingly the team ends up turning him in after one too many betrayals, along with him becoming a massive security risk due to leaving DNA for a mage to exploit everywhere.
  • Tank showed shades of this earlier on ^note like coming out of his house in full combat armour, brandishing a LMG and a Troll-sized combat axe despite being in a peaceful, cop-monitored downtown neighbourhood, or charging back into his house after a run goes catastrophically wrong despite being warned that it's booby-trapped, but the crowning moment of stupid is the time when for some utterly incomprehensible reason, he signs into a hotel under his actual name and SIN. He does this despite knowing there's a running team and Fixer out there who want his head on a plate, which gets him geeked by the running team.
  • One of Wildcard's Red Shirt teammates checked the group's bounties on his personal commlink midway through a bank job. Wildcard's response is swift, with the man even lampshading how much of an idiot the guy was.
    Wildcard: (After headshotting the traitor) Burn his body, we don't want a datatrail. Idiot signed his death warrant when he checked our bounties on his personal commlink. As if I wouldn't hack it.
• Token Evil Teammate: Geppetto. Jesus Christ, Geppetto. He's easily the most black-hat of the entire team, what with having once killed a man by slowly levitating him into an ''active sentient mass of nuclear waste'' just to enjoy his death a little more.
• Undeathly Pallor: Geppetto's emergency transformation into a banshee leaves him with an extreme form of albinism.
• Villain Protagonist: The team is this in A Lighter Shade of Black or Black-and-Gray Morality. The Sixth World just does not have heroes.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Bend unlocks this power when he becomes Buddhist. He uses it to travel as a Kangaroo, of all things. ^note His gear does not transform with him, so the kangaroo pouch + their high landspeed make them ideal to move quickly across the city
• Yakuza: Trout was originally a Yakuza member, along with being part of Lone Star.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: The team's reaction to finding out that one of their rival teams has released three albums and a reality tridshow, all but advertising their strengths and weaknesses to the world. Commentary by Wildcat and Bend indicates this is fairly common for Los Angeles teams.
• Your Head A-Splode: The Ginsen face in Tokyo has a cranial explosive fitted, causing his head to blow up the moment that the company thinks he's compromised.
• You Killed My Father: During the timeskip between the Jetblack Run and the Ares Run, Dervish was attacked by a human who claimed he'd murdered his father and that the former had been killing for years before his memory loss.
• Wacky Fratboy Hijinx: Adversary arranges one such party with the help of Terrence Jackson. Deconstructed as the spirit's intent is to damn souls by facilitating date rapists.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Dervish turns an American flag in an America-themed Japanese trucker bar into a shemagh as part of a gambit to steal a truck. Afterwards he starts wearing an American flag bandana on his head and occasionally going by 'America-san'.
• Wham Line:
  • During the Final Run, the team uncovers a newspaper article featuring Mr. Johnson and a tall, handsome man with silver hair shaking hands — with the images of two dragons superimposed behind them, and a simple tagline that drives the team into paroxysms of nervous fear.
    LOFWYR AND SCHWARTZKOPF MEET TO DISCUSS PHARMACEUTICALS BUYOUT.
  • In a similar fashion, Wildcard/Bend's realisation of who's pulling Ginsen's strings, which serves to emphasise just how utterly crazy their final run has become and the fact that the team almost certainly aren't continuing to shadowrun afterwards:
    “Sirrurg the Destroyer is running Ginsen.”
• Wham Shot: During the Ares run, the team manage to track their target (the kidnapper of an Ares official's daughter) down to an airfield where a private plane is waiting to exfiltrate them. A team of Ares Firewatch soldiers, fully armed and armoured up, drop from a unmarked helicopter and breach the hangar where their quarry is... and then they come right back out, escorting the plane.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: After a night at Inferno, Geppetto wakes up in an absolutely filthy dumpster behind the bar with no memories of how he wound up there. Dervish explains he tried to speedball a mix of two drugs and human blood before passing out, at which point Adversary started shit with security and got beaten down.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: After the final job, the story ends with a summary of the lives of the surviving main and side characters in the years that followed.
• Wicked Cultured: Geppetto, who exclusively dresses in nice suits and has very refined taste.
• Willing Channeler: Geppetto and Adversary strike a deal where, in exchange for cooperating fully with Geppetto, Adversary gets to possess Geppetto's body when he sleeps.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Geppetto's civilian ID at the start of the story is an unremarkable middle manager. This hides the fact that he is a magic-wielding serial killer and later also a Shadowrunner.

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