GM's: Advice On Campaign Idea, Lengthy campaign planned, advice wanted. Options

[doublethink]

Hello all. A long time ago I used to play SR2 with my mates. We played a lot of our own stories mainly, and a few from the books, like Double Exposure. We stopped right before starting Super Tuesday.

I recently bought a bunch of SR3 books from a 2nd hand bookstore, so I've decided to try my hand at running a long SR campaign that would bring us up to the 2070's and SR4, but I'm in no hurry. I was going to follow the SR timeline, and inject news + events that match the timeline into the campaign. The goal here is to make the players feel like they're part of a living, breathing, changing world.

I want to take the runners from street level noobs to living legends by the mid-late 60's. I've been using the DS timeline as my main reference:

http://wiki.dumpshock.com/index.php/Timeline (should use mod_rewrite for nicer urls?)

I was thinking about starting a new campaign using the SR3 rules, and kicking off in late 2057, just as the corp war begins. I was then going to run a series of adventures from Blood in the Boardroom, finishing that campaign up with the closure of the Renraku Arcology in late 2059. Perhaps sneak in some mob related activity also (but I don't have that book).

During that time I was going to use Bug City and design a one-off adventure in Chicago, 'cause it's creepy and I figure you gotta go there at least once. Maybe someone can have a "good merge" while they're there :) Perhaps the runners are vital in finding research/data regarding the construction of FAB Strain III.

I have Renraku Arcology: Shutdown + Brainscan, so I was going to then start using adventures + events from there.

After that, I'm not sure what year it would be, but I was going to use the material in System Failure in order to finish up the campaign with a bang (crash) around 2064/2065. The runners should be very experienced now, and I was going to "retire" them at this point, moving them to be NPC's behind the scenes in SR4, and getting my friends to create new runners for the 70's (and jump forward a few years). Bumping into your former character during a run would be interesting - especially when you have to then run away :)

So, what do you guys think? Any advice? Tips? Other books I'll need?

// dt