Creative run environments, Not just another office building Options

[snowRaven]

I had the character's sent to an oil drilling platform in the middle of the north sea to take care of a rogue cyberzombie that had gone ballistic and killed the crew (the place had been converted to a secret Novatech research lab) - most of the platform was built with ferrous metal and the zombie had powerful magnetic implants so he could literally run up the walls.

It was a very interesting run. Oh, and did I mention that they were paid a huge bnus if they took down the zombie without damaging him? :vegm:

(They actually managed it...)

[Impact]

Hehehe - lessee, done the missile silo(with a doozy of a past), Oil Rig, underwater arcology under construction with no SCUBA/rebreather gear, the Louvre, The British Museum, Nursery School during nap-time, abandoned meat-packing plants, slaughterhouses(FUN background count), Circus, hospitals of all shapes and sizes....my runners get bored with the same old same old.

[Arcanum V]

MissileBases.com.

I used one of these for one of my favorite runs. The top end was more like a run of the mill missile silo that had been converted into a top secret underground lab. The bottom end was more. . . buggy. And unholy.

. . . in a Kult kind of way. Nachtkafers and techrones are fun! :eek:

I've also used Scotty's Castle, a computer nerd's robot-filled basement, Hissarlik (Troy), the Sea Shadow, Area 51, Angkor Wat, and the Karnak Temple in one form or another.

[Comedian]

All about the offshore oil platform.

Disco clubs, movie theatres(porno theatres if you really like to screw with your players), garbage dumps, hospitals, paintball/lasertag facilities, castles, Gold/diamond mines, churches, logging factories, corn fields/rice paddies/cultured pearl farms, hydroelectric dams...

[Cray74]

[Hot Wheels]

odd runs we've had include a gym, a bordello with theme rooms and the kingdome, which they obviously rebuilt by 2050 ;) .

That was fun becasue the GM who ran that was pretty familiar with the guts of Giants Stadium so had a good idea what the behind the scenes stuff was like.9workers wewre disappearing and the union was ready to take action, solve it before we get bad press!

[Drain Brain]

[snowRaven]

and Kult is 'Made in Sweden', too! :grinbig:

EVIL game...maybe do an SR crossover? Kult in 2063 anyone???

[mfb]

lessee. i'm currently running a Betrayal (Threats 2) firefight on the top of an autotruck convoy. i'm planning a fight eventually that will take place in the middle of a parachute drop; i'm trying to decide of the runners will have already strapped their chutes on, or if they'll have to chase 'em down. i'm also pondering a melee in the middle of a strobe-lit, very loud, very packed dance floor--maximum confusion. we once had a random gang fight in the midst of a grocery store, a la food fight--that was a blast, since both of the runners involved ("involved" in this case can be defined as "caught smack in the middle") had brought their kids along. a melee on a large glass skylight might be intersting--figure up some on-the-spot rules for deciding whether or not someone's done something that will break the pane they're standing on.

when you're in need of inspiration, go rent a high-octane action flick, and watch their fight scenes.

[Talia Invierno]

Seattle remaining still a major crossroads: if it's anywhere in the world, sooner or later it's likely to turn up in Seattle. If the runners themselves don't bring it there or create it, some group of runners or other players will have.

[Drain Brain]

[Talia Invierno]

:D

Several standard environments are easily quirked simply by using unusual temperatures - or weather conditions! - for that environment. A nice, blinding snowfall inside that standard office building can really put a damper on the average shadowrunner's day ...

[Stormdrake]

Am working on a possible run on the Field Museum in Chicago (before Strain III but after the quarantine). A friend used to work their and gave me a map that they use to use to navigate the lower levels. Very maze like. If any one has seen the movie reliquary(?) the museum they are running through is the Field Museum. The runners could find almost anything in there. I have been told that the museum was used as a human refuge in the quarantine period but that just leads to images of Aliens and the space marines, lol. It also throws in a nice moral issue. Do they get what they came for and leave the humans to die or do they aid the humans and possibly blow the run?

[Lazarus]

Want to send the runners to a complete sh*thole? Send them to Africa. There is desert, mountains, jungles, rampant megacorp abuse, and not to mention racial genocide. Man if you want the characters to see grim, dark reality staring them in the face, Africa. I sent my players there and their characters have not been the same since. (Tough to complain about the Barrens of Seattle when you have seen much, much worse. It's also tough to have any empathy for super rich corp types when you see how they make all that money.)

[Stormdrake]

Research bases or prisons in the artic could be fun and creepy. Especially if the inhabitants have vanished or died horribly seemingly at each others hands.

[Drain Brain]

[ShieldT]

Stormdrake - The Relic?

[Stormdrake]

My bad. I gave the title of the book that followed the relic but was thinking of "The Relic".

[Snow_Fox]

[Dim Sum]

Unusual locales in which my players have found themselves:
- a deep underwater arkoblock slowly flooding (Abyss meets The Rock).
- an ancient Mayan teocalli filled with old booby-traps (very Indianna Jones).
- top of a speeding train (hehe, yeah, very cliched).
- (hijacking) a naval submarine (a la Under Siege with a twist).
- a haunted house in an amusement park.
- Hiroshima a day before the atomic bomb was dropped (time travel scenario which didn't work out as well as I thought it might).
- unopened kaer from the Earthdawn era (went surprisingly well!).
- an aging VLCC (that's Very Large Crude Carrier for the uninitiated).
- catacombs in Rome.

[Drain Brain]

How about the lair of a something in a geode or crystaline cavern formation?

[ShieldT]

How about a rice field in CFS or otherwise? You have 6-30 foot ditches filled randomly with water (whether you jump or swim it's a great way to test your Athletics), some with crumbling sides ready to absorb any passing too heavy vehicle, hundreds of bridges in various states of repair. You have too thin dirt roads that twist and turn and sometimes dead end without apparent reason, weeds lining them too high to see across in places, others where you have no landmark for miles. The main gravel roads are great for fishtailing and scraping up a car's paintjob if you go too fast. You even have rice fields that are flooded, blocky rough and dry, filled with 5 foot rice, or flooded with 5 foot rice depending on the time of year. Great for rolls involving tripping / losing your shoes or even your socks. You also have small airstrips for clandestine transportation, and the pounding seasonal rain can flood and washout areas of road, or render places death traps for vehicles, depending on your mood. The local barns are also great for track vehicles and local Alien-syle 'walker' loaders, great for esoteric rigging.

CFS agriculture is naturally a focal point for the country's 'Water Wars'... And you can always have a paracritter/manhunt across the fields. How about having to kill a flock of storm crows threating to rain out harvest and costing local farmers millions of :nuyen: ? Have the farmer provide vehicles with heavy mounted net guns and see how well they navigate :)
Maybe they were even introduced as part of a localized corp plot, so you can expect opposition..

How about having to track a huge animal.. Or say... Your runners were asked to go to the local town and 'extract' the resident with internal nanites giving off a radio signal. The run goes off without a hitch, except, while being transported to the dropoff point over a bridge he reveals himself as a seal shapeshifter and disappears (maybe even still handcuffed/whatever) into the network of ditches. Ignore the nanites and impose a time limit if you really want it to be hairy.

Don't forget to have them run afoul of any local nature spirits equipped with Confusion/whatever. :grinbig:

This post has been edited by ShieldT: Oct 28 2003, 03:46 AM

[Seville]

I always wanted to send the runners to a long abandoned, sunken nuclear sub. Maybe something where the virus wiped out the whole crew, but the hull is intact, and the runners have to go down an locate it. Nothing works anymore, but there are Shedim trapped down there, who use the PCs equipment to escape. The players have to jury rig the equipment on the sub to escape, and maybe the aging hull finally begins to leak due to the runners actions. Could be lots of fun.

[Kanada Ten]

How about a luxurious Spa, nestled in the Cascades. You could have Cascade Crows as guards around the land and security personal on-site. Or not.

It would suck to get trapped there in the winter while trying to steel some of the spa's famous healing water. Then to accidently release the angery spirits once set to guard the springs, but that the lodge owners had trapped in a champagin bottle. Of course the spirits don't attack directly. Instead they use Confusion and Illusions to drive you insane.


[Edit]That site even has floor plans for some of the lodge and ballrooms, ect.

[Talia Invierno]

It might suck even more if the PCs choose to go there for some downtime R&R and decide to have some fun ... :grinbig: