Shadowrun Help

Could hurt them regionally? I ended my campaign with the team busting into Aztechnology's local offices to erase data on their technomancer buddy (after siccing a mob of toxic mages on the place as a distraction) and they winded up fighting the feathered dragon regional manager in a chase/battle through the whole building.
I guess it helps I wasn't strictly running Shadowrun: I hate the rules so I used Sixth World instead

How attached are your characters to their own lives? How willing are they to die to make Ares hurt?

You arent ever going to end Ares but depending on your resources, luck and commitment, you can make the people in charge of it hurt. Target CEOs and other higher level corp execs, investors and, if you really want to make it personal, target their families.

Just be aware, they will come after you, so you need to hit hard and fast, keep moving and keep up the momentum before they finally overwhelm you. Then all you can do is make them bleed as long as it takes them to crush you and then deny them the satisfaction of actually killing you.

It wont really amount to much in the long run and Ares will keep chugging along. But you might make their quarterly profits dips long enough to merit a mention in their corporate history books and security training manuals.

My group went on a massive tear against Renraku which ended with a running firefight through Tokyo and huge collatoral damage. We lasted a grand total of 5, 5 hour sessions.

I should note, we put in a great deal more time and effort into preparing for the strike and gathering, allies, resources and information.

But once we struck we were almost constantly on the run until we were ended.

so is anyone else scared about anons drive to inflict revenge on a fictional character at the expense of a game?

Nah, seems about right.

Over a year of weekly sessions in our group was dedicated towards getting revenge on a Johnson that fucked us over.

We were just roleplaying our characters after having Renraku fuck us over majorly after we pulled a big job for them, as usual with shit intel and way more complications, and got them everything they had requested, only to have them try and wipe us out and then follow up on that attempt at our base of operations.

We just reminded them why its generally less expensive to just PAY the Shadowrunners for their job, even if you shortchange them.

Basically how it started, we just found out it hadnt been his call and followed the intel chain to the guy who gave the order. Turns out we´d been in a lot deeper than we expected, but that just made us more resolved to hurt them all the worse.

Turned out it was really fun prepping to accomplish one major goal as a team and commiting all our other jobs and resources into completing it. Even developing our characters was aimed towards that goal.

Some of the plans we concoted were pretty fun too and we were able to explore options we generally wouldnt with characters more attached to staying alive.

Storytime?

I'm from the same group as , and our DM actually wrote 3 short stories related to our group. I keep asking him to either put them in /srg/ or let me do it, and hopefully now that someone's explicitly asked I'll be able to convince him to let me.

>storytime
Okay, so I was running a Sixth World (Dungeon/Apocalypse World hack) campaign where early on the team were asked by the last survivor of a runner team to help him accomplish his mission and avenge his friends after an Azzie run went bad thanks to blood magic.

The team consisted of, over the course of the story:
>an ork ex-Royal Marine commando, who was all about being professional and getting the job done subtlely
>a dwarf drone rigger and vehicle operator who was the exact opposite, he turned the Stuffer Shack in Food Fight into a warzone nearly single-handedly
>a human shaman who was originally a buttoned-up corp boss with Humanis leanings until he got betrayed and sold to the Azzies as testing material
>a nature-boy troll mage whose player was a dumb shit and who left later on
>and an edgy elf face-man who was under orders from Telestrian himself to help the team deal with some of the bug spirits in Seattle (the game was set in the 2050s)

Anyway, the mission where this weedy decker's buddies got geeked was in a hidden research facility in the Barrens. Nobody goes there, it's a perfect place to hide. The team had been explicitly told not to leave any blood or other forensic trace behind, because that's how they brought his team down. Ritual casting's a bitch.

Anyway, they managed this, stole the data, destroyed everything and busted out both the shaman and a sasquatch they'd been keeping (although there was a close call when the ork decided the best way to deal with the patrol drone was to camouflage up to it and throw it down a broken lift shaft, which got him shot point-blank for his troubles and necessitated him having to mix up the gory ruins of a mass of devil rats he coerced into distracting the drone into his bloodstains)

So, job done, decker is now best buds with the team and offers his help with anything that they need hacking for a fair cut, surely that's the end of it, right?
Wrong. It should be noted that the ork commando, dwarf and troll all shared the same apartment block, because a week later a bunch of very angry guys in what looked like stolen Red Samurai armour fast-roped onto its roof and started tearing the place up and yelling "WHERE'S THE TECHNOMANCER".

Don't know if OP is still here but maybe you could go for a classic 'even gods can bleed' sort of thing. You can't kill a mega corp, it doesn't work like that. But you can always hurt it's image, even if it is just in Seattle. Lie, tamper and blackmail. make them not only lose their public image but make them the laughing stock of the big ten. Even if you don't cut too deep into the bottom line, if they can't punish you, you win.

This got even worse when a barely-airworthy rustbucket chopper showed up and started spewing out deranged cultists screaming "For the Hive!".
A huge gunfight broke out, and even with their fancy armour these guys were getting pounded to hell: the mage entangled several in spectral roots and made them easy targets, the dwarf's drones just flat-out butchered them with overwhelming firepower, the mage summoned a spirit that tore up the place, and the ork alternately shot them or shoved a combat knife into bits that should never have a combat knife shoved into. Although they did manage to kill several of the cultists in this absolute clusterfuck of a three-way firefight.

Their last kill fell through the glass door to the greenhouse on the roof, while the rest scrambled into their choppers and ran. I believe one of the drones shot down a chopper, but most of the people onboard survived and scattered into the sewers. Whether or not they survived them is another story entirely.
It turned out the Red Samurai suits weren't Renraku-made at all, but a copy: the markings were all wrong.

Short answer:

You can't.

Long answer: Ares is backed by the corporate court, has its fingers in too many pies, and worst of all, has insurance. Trying to actually destroy it in a meaningful action would require resources.
>how much resources?
If you have to ask, too much.

Ares, or any of the big 10 and a lot of AA corps are equivalents to countries. Imagine, how would you take over or kill a country that has constituents everywhere?

Killing off the people won't do it. Blowing up the infrastructure won't do it. There's no single bank account to drain. These companies survived the Crash 2.0. You'd need to engineer a global catastrophe at the same time as destroying multiple records around the world, or brainwash a good minority of the entire world.

Or you could try making them go bankrupt, but good luck with that, bigger corps than you have tried.

What you CAN do is kill some people who made you hurt. And take their positions, take what they had for your own.

Aim for that. Trying to change the system is not worth it and will get you killed.

Turns out Electroshock, the decker, was more than a decker: he was capable of interfacing with the Matrix without a deck. And to magically-minded corps, that was something worth trying to study and exploit.

Over several months of doing other jobs (one in London where the edge-elf literally stabbed a man to death in a bar and passed it off as him being plastered long enough to haul his body out the door and dump it in the street, another where they found a toxic mage in the backwoods and ended up needing serious medical attention after killing him) they eventually figured out it was the Azzies seriously gunning for their buddy, and unless they did something they'd hunt him across the globe. Thankfully his data hadn't been sent down to HQ for backup yet: if they destroyed the info on him, local backups and all, before they could send it to the higher-ups he had a shot at disappearing.

But even a regional office of one of the Big Ten is no picnic. They'd need a plan, and a damn good one.
It just so happens that their plan was just good enough to work.

It turns out the toxic they'd put down had friends: they'd insisted on following up every Matrix-related lead on him despite them going nowhere besides "his friends have gone into hiding down south". With a little bit of digital spoofing and some highly refined bullshit they not only managed to convince them he was alive, but a prisoner of the Azzies in Seattle and in need of rescue ASAP. The dwarf's drones flew surveillance over the arcology so they'd know when the attack was happening, and so began the uneasy wait.

Eventually the drones noticed a disturbance at the gates. Once the team actually got there in person there was nothing left but bloodstains and bodies and an eerie, busy silence. And so they went in.

They managed to creep in, meeting very little resistance but lots of evidence of the toxics' rampage: a general lockdown, bodies riddled with sores or practically glowing with rads, general nastiness all around.
They'd gotten into an office when they heard the sounds of approaching footsteps. As they hid, they realised that Aztechnology's security teams had won the day and were conducting a sweep for any remaining toxics or other intruders.
They didn't notice the PCs until it was too late, one was stabbed in the neck while everyone else started unloading their guns into the hapless patrol. The resulting fight was short and brutal.

Once the team made it to the server room, they realised two things. One, it was directly below the CEO office on the roof, and two, it had the highest security of the entire building, including a pair of cyberzombies in stasis. The team had ran into one before and hoped never to do so again, but things didn't quite work out that way.

Even worse, one of the surviving toxics had linked up with them and was convinced they were on his side. Or at least, that their goals aligned.
I honestly don't remember how they managed it, but they made it into the server room and had just began erasing the records of one Electroshock when a giant claw pierced the ceiling from above, tearing it off and flinging it aside.

And leaving them face to face with a feathered serpent bigger than a bus.

The toxic went up like a torch, the elf frantically stabbed the dragon in the claw with his enchanted letter-opener of a knife, and things would have gone very badly in the resulting fight if a drone the dwarf hadn't seen since the Eurowars hadn't shown up and unloaded a missile barrage into the dragon's side, causing it to take off and pursue it.

The team fled downwards into the building, the serpent in hot pursuit and trying to attack them through the windows, the team firing potshots at them in return. The ork came up with a plan: the arcology had to have some kind of armoury or gun shop, and they'd need as much firepower as possible to have a chance of killing the beast. So they ran for their lives to the arcology's built-in mall.

Honestly OP, it's more realistic to try to take over a megacorp than destroying it. And even that's pretty... unlikely.

>ITT: Street runners who cant get creative about corporate homicide

Look OP, im not going to say you cant kill Ares or any other megacorp , but im going to be honest with you most of the other posters are right about one thing. your better off try to get revenge on the guy/guys who screwed you rather than taking down the whole company.

your not going to take them down via straight up shadowrunning, busting into their main HQ guns blazing will only get you killed, and even if you managed to do something crazy like detonate a nuke in their main HQ that still wouldn't kill them. to actually accomplish something like what your asking would require an Old Man Henderson level of creativity and Shenanigans. im not saying it cant be done but you got to think outside of the box and odds are you have a 99.999999% chance of dyeing either way even if you some how succeed.

in short, your better off trying to get revenge on some individual level, but if your deadset on taking down the man, Godspeed and shine on you crazy diamond, and remember you have to be creative to pull it off.

Picking their way through the neon, gaudy advertisements for own-brand products, the team just managed to find the gun shop in time for them to hear breaking glass and a loud scrabbling of claws from further down the hall. The dragon was trying to get in to kill them, and while the ork frantically tried to find the largest gun he could the rest of the team headed out to try and hold the creature off.

Against all the odds, the gun shop had just taken delivery of an assault cannon for one of the more firepower-consious members of the security forces, but hadn't issued it out yet. He loaded the thing, checked the action, chambered a shell and walked out towards the gun battle.
The feathered serpent spewed fire, halfway through the window. He'd have to be fast, but at least like this it couldn't dodge. He aimed. Fired.

His target roared and thrashed as the shell punched into its face. He aimed. Fired again. And again.
It was only when the deafening roar of the third shot had died down and all was silent that he realised the target was still and had been since the second.

And that's pretty much where we ended things.

Play Shadowrun Dragonfall or Hong Kong

For what it's worth, in one of my games (Detroit) the main campaign the PCs are on (don't know yet) is that this degenerate gang of thrill-gangers from the CZ are planning on planting nukes at the base of the pillars that hold up the detroit overcity as revenge for Chi-town.
>nuking their world HQ still won't kill the megacorp

also forgot to mention that one of their mages are gonna accidentally insectify themselves with a focus made from one of Dunzelkahn's kidney stones, so while the Gang is trying to blow the fuck out of Detroit, it'll get buggy

also MCT and the Yaks will be trying to get the kidney stone while the Russian and Italian mobs start a full-on war and gangs will flood into the overcity looking to loot while KE has a million problems

Being serious, though OP:

Step 1: hack the Zurich Orbital. This step's the easy bit, I'll let you do the planning for it.

Step 2: strike off Ares Macrotechnology from the companies registrar.

Congratulations, you killed Ares!

Fucking easy.