Horror and SR, Do your players want scary? Options

[2Claws]

Shadowrun has always been very cyberpunk oriented for me and admittedly I was getting a little bit blase with the same mix of street activity and run. That changed, when our GM decided to throw us a curveball, by adding an element we had not considered...horror.

The SR universe is full of things that do very...wrong things. Most aren't fully explained and, in our case, the GM developed some things beyond the books.

I'll give a brief overview of the game, but I'm interested if any of you have had the "SR as horror" experience.

The characters started really young. We weren't street kids, just kids from the bad side of town trying to get through a magnet high school.

We were in Chicago and we knew the GM was going to introduce the bugs, what shocked us, was how he did it. He changed the name of the UB and made it very very personal, with the new church-like organization (with lots of rich, influential backers, but no central personality) recruiting directly from the student body and wierding us out when they returned to the campus to recruit more.

During this time, the characters became mixed up with a local criminal element and recieved the requsite PC kick 'splode training. During this time as low level knee breakers we started running into low-level bug manifestations.

The experience stretched out over 4 years of game time. Our friends turned to cult zombies and we kept running accros "nests" of astral maggots that seemed to consume what ever went through them. The PC shaman was attacked by a mantis spirit during a hit on a mage providing protection for a rival group. We thought it was just another form of spirit because we weren't clued in. Add "goblins" (think really ugly disease and possession resistant dwarves) confusing the issue publicly by giving out Chic Tract like literature on the coming of the bugs and then bombing the religous organization and we had a major atmosphere of paranoia.

The adventure culminated in an Aliens-like invasion where lots of people died, the PC's ran like hell and Chicago was nuked (not just down town). But, of course, we learned that bugs had moved elsewhere, so we set out to hunt them down and spread the word...the US Govt was keeping a lid on the situation. The only thing the outside world knew was that Chicago was quarantiend(sp) because of an infestation by a "spirit disease" and then something went very wrong, very fast. ALL Matrix connections were severed and and the bomb was called a terrorist attack. The government is still trying to round up survivors and is funding shadow ops to find us.

And the game continues.