Emo Samurai's Dedicated Campaign Thread, The Next Generation Options

[Glyph]

The toxic would be better off in a novel, really. Most PCs won't care about a toxic's motivations or personality quirks, and they will only care about the wife insofar as she could be used as a hostage or a shield.

I'm not saying that every NPC that is on the opposite side of the PCs should be a cardboard cutout, but the PCs probably won'tl be interested in exchanging pleasantries with him. That could be frustrating, having a complex personality mapped out for an NPC, and having the PCs be solely interested in destroying him.

[emo samurai]

Hmm... I think I'll have the toxic mage give the lady cancer when he puts his hands on her; his hands'll glow green a little, and five months later, she'll cough up blood. The elves don't have proof, so they can't call the police, but her husband/surrogate brother wants revenge, so he hires them to take him out. The problem is, another group of shadowrunners attacks him while they're casing his house, and it's then that they see how much power he has, and the nature of it.

If they talk to the DIMR, they'll verify that he's most likely a toxic mage with a hidden life pact based on how easily he shrugs off bullets and dispatches the other shadowrunners. They won't put out a public bounty on him, since it would pit them against a government and they don't have any proof, but they will spread the word on Shadowlands and pay off the group.

Research will turn up tips on defeating the toxic mage, one of which will be bringing up something he was attached to before the pact to help him reassert his mind. This will leave him open to mind probing, since he'll do anything he can to help them.

The novel will end with him using the year and a day that the spirit is gone to try to reassemble his mind with the help of the DIMR and break his own spirit pact.

Shen will be a character in the novel; he won't be the narrator, since he's too alien. He'll seem like a sort of Zen smartass; if somebody tells him that they used to get loads of contracts during the Corporate War, he'll say "In times of famine, only the coffin-maker is happy."

[emo samurai]

I have an idea for the ending.

Shen goes on a quest into the guy's mind using a spell and takes the form of his pre-hidden life girlfriend so that he's granted free passage. He finds the spirit's formula there. He spends the next month crafting a copy of the formula inside a force 12 mana lodge. Since the spirit's bound to this plane, it senses the creation of the formula even before it's finished, but since it's not quite finished and it's under a force 12 masking ward, it only knows its position to within 100 miles.

In preparation for when the formula is finally finished, it makes contact with a hidden wasp invae hive consisting solely of good merges and threatens to expose it if they don't help it once it comes time for the banishing ritual. Once the formula is finished and the spirit knows exactly where it is and it's summoned into the ward, invae swarm the hive, and Knight Errant is sent an automated message from the spirit's computer that some bad shit is going down where the ward is. It ends with the main character calling Knight Errant down on the power site Shen's using to bind the spirit.

[emo samurai]

I have a new idea for a run. It's based off of an idea for a short story I just got.

The story starts off with an office scene. It's boring and nerve-wracking like most offices. Then, suddenly, a masked gunman walks in, shoots the boss in the face, and escapes through the window.

The coworkers are surprised to find that they aren't exactly horrified by the occurence. They become more bold with the appearance of their unseen champion, mouthing off to bosses, refusing to attend meetings, and finally holding a party. Then the masked man is caught and shown to be a former employee that everybody hated. The masked man loses his mystique, and everything goes back to business as usual.

Until a leader arises among them and makes them realize that the masked man was exactly as they were, embodying both their sycophantic natures and their capacity for violent change. They pool their resources, call in their contacts, and hire the players to destroy the evidence room.

While they're doing the legwork for the run, word will spread that they're taking down Lone Star, and people will chime in with encouragement and resources. Word will also spread to the Star, which will do its best to protect the evidence room. The players will have to fight to keep their endeavor secret while finding as much information as possible for this difficult run. They'll run a balancing act, since inevitably, people will pitch in money to encourage them, sometimes lots of money.

[emo samurai]

I'm starting an AIM game, if anyone wants to join. The link is here

[emo samurai]

If Shen starts sponsoring a PC as his personal assassin, is that too Mary Sue-ish? I mean, he's able to pay for it easily even without GMPCing the rules away.

Like, "You will never tell anyone about your work for me so that I may avoid repercussions and strike at powerful people anonymously. If anyone ever finds out you work for me, I will kill you. If you take a job without my permission, I will kill you. In return, you will get 10,000 :nuyen: a week as retainer when you aren't on the job and many times that much when you are. I will also pay for your training and cyberware. I will provide assistance as necessary."

I mean, it makes Shen a Fu Manchu type and benefits the player, but it also eliminates any pretense of equality.

Thoughts?

[emo samurai]

Oh, and I'm also having FanGirl get captured by a female vampire at some point. She'll drill FanGirl on what she wants and why she does it, and at the end, the vampire'll taste FanGirl's blood, kiss her, and then the vampiress'll allow the rising sun to kill her, or so it seems. In reality, it'll be an illusion spell, and she already learned how to protect herself from the sun magically. She thinks it's better that FanGirl thinks she's dead. This will happen just as the rest of the party tracks her down and saves her.

This'll happen right after a run, and hopefully will take about 15 minutes.

[fistandantilus4....]

[emo samurai]

They don't like their boss, and they've been repressed for so long that the rebelliousness in the act is more important than the fact it was a killing. It awakens something deep within them that has never been awakened before.

They work in a shitty form-processing company that still uses paper.

[fistandantilus4....]

[Mal-2]

[emo samurai]

I contend that what they do is not wrong; they were merely vicariously participating in the striking back against a tyrant.

They don't go out and kill babies; they just violate the dress code by coming to work in jeans.

[fistandantilus4....]

:rotfl:

And hire shadowrunners to protect a psychotic killer

Seriouly, at least put something in their drinking water so you can add another level to the craziness. That would top it nicely. Horizon was secretly doing experimentation to see how groups would respond to certain chemicals that remove such annoying little things like morals and ethics. Boss gets shot? Meh, back to work. (Emporer's New Groove - sweet)

[emo samurai]

Hmmm... Sounds interesting...

Then again, sometimes they don't come to work at all, and if they don't, then they do so as a group.

[emo samurai]

Speaking of lesbian vampires, Shen will find her when she's weaker and tell her that she can't kill people without his permission. He'll give her a list of murderers, rapists, and middle managers and even help her hunt down the worst of them. In return, he won't kill her, and will set her up with an apartment in a Middle neighborhood.

[emo samurai]

Oh, and he'll have a pet wendigo in approximately the same arrangement. They'll work side by side, eating people in their own peculiar ways.

[Fortune]

[emo samurai]

Ummmm.... crap.

As for the lesbian vampire, she'll kiss FanGirl because she's pure-hearted, not because the vampire's a lesbian. She'd kill and eat anybody else.

[Fortune]

[emo samurai]

Of course not. My bad. :D

I think Shen'll be the GMPC NPC, in that he'll be as powerful as the players, he'll just move the plot along more than actually run with them.

[emo samurai]

Edited.

[emo samurai]

I'm thinking of involving one of the players in Shen's plots to take down the Seattle underworld, but he uses extensive memory manipulation on them. How will I make it a surprise to the player when his character finds out that he's being mindfucked? In other words, how do I keep it secret from the player that he's being mindfucked even as he performs all these jobs for Shen?

[Glyph]

[emo samurai]

Actually, most of the "Take over shit" stuff is done while GMPC Shen is asleep and being possessed by the spirit Shen under the terms of their dream pact. GMPC Shen, or Kwan Lin, will be a very nice person who's something of a pop culture junkie. He'll be 28. The spirit will be the Fu Manchu side of him. He's the one with the fractal black and white suit.

And as for a plot point that doesn't involve Shen, here's one. The CEO of an startup that is making a Matrix media player that works within AR games wants to create illegal addons that break media format patents and do things like enable filesharing. To do this, he wants to leak the source code so that there's a plausible explanation for a few "unofficial" cracks to his media player that appear on the market a few months after the leak. Those "unofficial" cracks will actually be made by him.

The first run will be a loyalty test, to see if they'll keep secrets well. They'll be captured by another, larger team of shadowrunners posing as corp security in the Barrens, and then subjected to torture by Ares drones. if they don't talk, then they'll be released mysteriously and they'll be hired for the second run. They will hopefully never find out that he commissioned the first run.

The second run will be the leak. They'll break and enter the well-guarded office, but do so in a way that an urban exploration gang would do it. They have to make it look like a hacker gang breakin rather than a shadowrunner breakin. This will of course involve dressing up flashily and bringing down corp sec upon crossing the right threshold.

The third run will be speeding him away to a Cayman Islands house safely in return for stock in his company, which has skyrocketed due to increased usage of his media player, even though much of the usage is illegal.

And by the way, that GM is the WORST GM EVAR.

And the toxic is named Lethros.

[emo samurai]

I have an idea for a new character.

His name is Ku, the Japanese word for "void." He used to be a Renraku soldier on the fast track to Red Samuraihood. His adept powers are all contingent on a talisamn geas (katana).

From childhood, Ku believed in the gentrifying power of Renraku. After all, it produced amazing tecnology and transcended national boundaries as far as its spreading of technology goes. It provides housing in wonderful shiny arcologies, etc. etc. This hope quickly evaporated in the face of Renraku's invasion of the Phillipines, where he finally saw the real ethic of the soldier: to kill and murder with great license in the name of one's master.

One day he saw his squadmates surround and kill a young Filipino woman, and he reported it to his commander. His commander reported it to his commander, and the case was covered up because they didn't want to taint Renraku's corporate image.

He resigned immediately afterwards. There was nothing to mark his passing, save for the deaths of his squadmates, which all happened on the same night, and they were all found with their stomachs split open and their heads lopped off. Trace metals found in the stomach wounds indicated that they had been caused by their own swords, presumably in an act of seppuku. They had numerous other cuts all over their bodies.

It turned out that Ku had toyed with them during their duels, making it clear that it would be impossible for them to defeat him. So he gave them the option of dying honorably by their own swords, which they took after varied amounts of prodding.

He took to the shadows shortly afterwards, and he has a side hobby of hunting down company men and killing them in one-on-one duels, usually ending with them committing "honorable" suicide with their own weapons.

He will do any job for the right price, but if he finds his employer distasteful, he will gladly kill him soon after receiving his transaction. Secretly, of course, in ways that do not use his modus operandi.

Is he too Mary Sue? Keep in mind that his powers are all canon; all his adept powers will have a katana geas, with another initiation geas probably taken later on when he makes his own sword.