Help me be an Evil GM

[Deekin]

I am currently running a 4th Ed Shadowrun game IRL. I am also taking 5 college classes, so I need help coming up with ideas for runs. Toss me some ideas!

The Runners are currently based in Hong Kong- but they have a Osprey, adapted to land on water, along with a Roadmaster that can turn into a submarine. Yeah, this game is a little bit crazy.

[TheUdjat]

Don't really know Shadowrun, so I'm afraid I've got nothing to offer. But best of luck. I find ideas for tabletop games are always trickier than play-by-post.

[Deekin]

Sept 2, 2008 21:10:11 GMT -5 TheUdjat said:

Don't really know Shadowrun, so I'm afraid I've got nothing to offer. But best of luck. I find ideas for tabletop games are always trickier than play-by-post.

Shadowrun can best be described as Cyberpunk meets High Fantasy. Or what would happen if William Gibson and Anne McCaffrey had a love child.

It's set in a dystopian near future where megacorporations have taken over as the superpowers of the world, the world's political boundaries are shaken and fragmented, and Dragons and Magic play just as big a part of life as computers and guns. In fact, they often overlap.

[menatkhufu]

Udjat can help you in being evil, in the Shards he likes having Mynok beaten, shredded to death and eaten by deadly beetles alive. =)

[Japic]

When in doubt turn to television for answers. KMans been getting joked at for years that every plot in his games is somehow related to a movie plot. While not always true, certain parallels can certainly be drawn. He and I bounce ideas off eashother all the time and between us come up with a number of elements to the plots/scenarios that we've been playing in his games. It's good to ask the community, but the final inspiration needs be yours, so that you can run with it.

Pretend you're Hollywood and find something that you rather liked, then adapt part of that story for your own uses; rip it off if you must. Lets say that you really enjoyed Johnny Mnemonic (arguably the most shadowrun-like movie ever produced) and you wanted to take some part of that and build a plot off it.

I don't know what kind of team you've got, but if they're at all into the brainy parts, then breaking into a megacorporation (either in real life or via hacking) to steal data might be fun. If they like to kill everything they find, then you'll want to set op either an epic chase of sorts (chaser or chased up to you) where combat and quick thinking will get them through. They're in the middle of a gang/mega-corp war and they'll need to choose a side and play it through.

You're in Tokyo, take a page from (a not so great movie) The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and have them get involved with a high stakes racing scene. Have them be in trouble with the Yakuza and they must go out and collect on Yakuza debts or die trying. Take a page from horror films and hit them with a zombie epidemic that they can get to the bottom of. A page from any superhero movie where there's a villan/hero that needs be taken out (good guy or bad, depending on the group's morals) because he's been cropping up and ruining their fun.

There's a million and one ideas out there, you just need to figure out what's good for your team. If you're inspired with a story it should all fall into place and go smoothly.

[Badasterysk]

Just buck-shotting ideas, I haven't run Shadowrun since the 2nd edition (but man was it big fun!), so some of this may not be relevant.

-Destroy (steal, etc.) one (or both) of their vehicles- immediately!
-PCs need to 'acquire' a new spell
-A rogue/escaped science experiment (gone wrong) must be tracked and neutralized... discreetly
-A small group of teens is playing around with something they think is hookey (ouija board, etc.), but they actually summon a demon (creature/whatever).
-Find some interesting/weird fact about Hong-Kong (or better yet some type of urban legend or myth- DRAGONS!!!) and run with it.
-A company wants to confirm the existence of/steal 'magically imbued bullets' (whatever effect) from one of thier competitors.
-A crime lord (actually a vampire) has it in for the PCs [this is one I acutally used- after fighting the vamp's brides, the PCs were down to one man- a rigger (careful on that spelling )- who remotely operated his recently tricked-out stud-mobile and, after drving it into the graveyard, blasting through headstones, ran over my friggin' baddie. Effed him right up.]

Man I miss this game.

[PiranJade]

I agree with Japic that many movies make excellent Shadowruns. I use to old books which are originally for the Cyberpunk RPG and which contain a series of runs in which the characters have to organize old original VHS tapes for a crazy collector and when doing so are sucked into a story which always somehow resembles the story of the movie, of course. The books are called "Media Junkie" ("Media Junkie, Take One" and "Media Junkie II - Final Cut") and cover the movies Plan 9 from outer Space, Dracula, The Exorcist, in Media Junkie One and Nosferatu, Cat People, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hellraiser, Alien and Night of the Living Dead in Media Junkie II.

Other than that I found that some groups also like runs which are not that typical for Shadowrun. I mostly get inspired for those by cross reading some of the source books. One time I did a run ste in India in which the runners had to convince a really rich guy, who was the son of an important Megacon family, to stop be a professional and successful combatbiker and go home to his family. Without harming him physically or mentally. That was really fun, especially because the players enjoyed the flavor of playing in India very much.
Picking some particulary interesting part of the shadowrun world and let the story evolve around that can be fun.

The next two runs I'll have to GM are a big street fighting thing taking place in Germany (well, in the ADL) and a "get that meta human prisoner out of Japan"-run with some interesting NPCs.