Punking Shadowrun, Less Shadows and more punk Options

[Chrysalis]

I was going back through my CD collection and I found all my old Marilyn Manson albums. I was watching the Beautiful People video and that got me to think of another song, Ich Will by Rammstein, who basically rob a bank as a giant publicity stunt.

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

[Pendaric]

"Unitity! As one step together. Unity! You know its got to come."
Operation Ivy

This is one reason we stick with SR3, the transhumanist movement is present but not prevasive. Or'zet rap is coming in but not dominating the street.
Indivduality is the by word of style and anarchistic rebellion the currency of liberty.

Sometimes you just need to be punk as frag.

[Malachi]

Hey, if that's how you want to GM the world, there's nothing stopping you.

[imperialus]

I was going back through my CD collection and I found all my old Marilyn Manson albums. I was watching the Beautiful People video and that got me to think of another song, Ich Will by Rammstein, who basically rob a bank as a giant publicity stunt.

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

The thing is, the world is going to have as much 'flavour' as the GM wants, and that flavour is going to take on whatever sort of personality the GM has

You want more drugs? Run Ghost Cartels
You want a reality TV show? Play PITO'ed runners in LA
You want a post apocalypse style game? Send em to Chicago.

Take my group for instance. There are 3 of us who have at one point or another GMed and we have vastly different ways of viewing the world. There are good things and bad things inherent in each style.

GM1: Really likes crazy over the top crap. In one campaign our teams ride was a pimped out GMC bulldog with a hottub, wetbar, and LED paint that flashed Chinese zodiac symbols. We went to war with a triad because a couple of their goons scratched the paint. That little vendetta culminated with hijacking an airplane and pushing a fuel air bomb out of the cargo doors onto their main warehouse. Another time we got our hands on a chemical weapon that could kill most of Hong Kong, he just wanted to see what we'd do with it. His campaigns tend to be pretty short, and very spontaneous, they're kind of like brush fires. They get going really fast, cause massive amounts of damage, and then burn themselves out. There just isn't enough coherence to keep things going, and within one or two runs we've inevitably pissed off enough really powerful people that our characters are walking dead.

GM2: Really likes more structured campaigns. He likes taking a single organization, be it a gang, a military unit, or whatever and making the PC's part of it. He likes the control it gives him over the storyline (he's the most railroady of the GM's) and we tend to like the fact that the 'organization', whatever it is gives us a ton of cool crap that most runners never see. Our most memorable experience with this GM was the climax of a Knight Errant campaign where we ended up doing a HALO drop into the southeast asian warzone wearing powerarmour to burn out an insect hive.

GM3: (me) I'm the most 'traditional' of the GM's. I tend to lean towards black ops/professional style campaigns that follow the more traditional format of "Meet Johnson, Get run, Do run, Get paid/screwed, Rinse, Repeat." I generally do have an overall 'goal' but my primary interest is in creating a realistic world that the PC's can explore and bang around the edges of. The big downside is that it's easy for the PC's to get 'lost' or start going in radically different directions.

[Sir_Psycho]

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

One of the things I find most interesting about shadowrun is that it's an exaggurated capitalist cultural wasteland, where money has either consumed and amalgamated culture and subcultures (Why do all those suits have mohawks?), effectively robbing them of any meaning and just turning them into brands.

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

I personally like embellishing NPC's with interesting bits of ware, like the bartender in Neuromancer with an antique pink plastic cyber-arm with a claw grip. The NPC's don't need to min-max, or think about practicality or how conspicuous their body mod is, so seeing a guy with a half cyberskull and a single cyber-eye can bring out the alienating cyberpunk dystopia you want. It's the little touches.

My girlfriend's flatmate used to live with a body piercer. She's comparitively tame, with back scarrification, tattoos, nose piercing, one above her top lip, stretched ears, dermal anchor on her chest, and two nipple piercings (she has a thing about symmetry). Ben, the guy she used to live with has some pretty full on mods, such as a plethora of genital piercings.

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

I honestly don't think this is a problem with the game. Shadowrun games are collaborative and creative, it's not like reading a book or watching a movie, that you can quantify and criticize. If you don't like what's going on, mix it up. You clearly know what you want. Make it happen.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

I think the game is reacting to the desires of the players. That, and everything you wish for, Chrysalis, is still available. One of Shadowrun's strengths is that it offers so much for so many different people. Sawed-off shotguns are still there. It's just a matter of playing it that way.

That's the tricky part. In my group, even if we start low level, the characters always work their way up the pay scale, and end up doing covert ops-style shadowruns on corporations - because that's what they want. You have to get the players to buy into your idea. You have to have characters whose motivations aren't add odds with them staying in the 'hood. You have to provide missions for them that are entertaining enough to keep them there. And maybe mess with them so they don't get the resources or the rep to move upward.

[JonathanC]

I was going back through my CD collection and I found all my old Marilyn Manson albums. I was watching the Beautiful People video and that got me to think of another song, Ich Will by Rammstein, who basically rob a bank as a giant publicity stunt.

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

It sounds like you want to be playing in SR Los Angeles. Plenty of reality show stuff with P2.0 shadowrunners, cultivating a 'look', and the fluff suggests that while there's still a place for cloak and dagger, the big bucks are in being a character and mugging for the camera while you're running.

[Blade]

A friend of mine ran a cinematographic run in L.A. The objective of the run was to kill someone on trideo and get the highest rating. (It turned out Mr. Johnson was an ex-oyabun who wanted to fake his death by killing a lookalike on trideo).

The runners ended up controlling the target with a posession spirit and staging the whole run, attaching explosives to a truck so that it exploded when it crashed, asking Knight Errants to send troops their way to add more drama while the team's face was busy contacting various corps to sell them product placement.

[nezumi]

I agree, it all comes down to the GM. The system as it stands really is geared more towards black shadowrun, with only a few nods still to the punk (although I suspect SR1/2 may have more of it). What would be useful to me, as a GM, is fan-based supplements to put some more punk in there. Maybe "ShadowPunk!" I never had a transcendentalist tattoo-artist room mate. My one room mate picked locks and stole stuff and the other one was a troll. So definitely, more resources would be very cool.

[ornot]

I agree that a large part of the theme or style is partly down to how the gm runs it, and secondly what the players want to do. My players seem to be mostly into quiet subtle runs with as low an ordinance budget as possible. They use a lot of social engineering and misdirection to earn their money. Two of them are into body modding, and have a bunch of tattoos and piercings, and have introduced me to the concept of subdermal implants among other things.

The way I play it is that body modification is more widespread than today, so the tamer forms we see today (tattoos, ear and nose piercing) are effectively the norm, while the kinds of people getting those things today get the more extreme stuff and 'ware for fashion purposes. Corpers have tattoos, usually with a theme common to their company, so their loyalty might even be recognised based on the tattoos they have. I've also taken to heart the wide availability of plastic surgery suggested in Augmentation. In my world few people are ugly or fat, and the clubs are always full of beautiful people, to the extent that it's not even relevant.

[Socinus]

I was going back through my CD collection and I found all my old Marilyn Manson albums. I was watching the Beautiful People video and that got me to think of another song, Ich Will by Rammstein, who basically rob a bank as a giant publicity stunt.

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

The system is designed to be done ultra-punk or ultra-sleek.

You can have missions that involve the Manson crowd or ones that call for James Bond. Look at it from the point of view of the Johnson.

If I want to have a rival exec knocked off, am I gonna drop 500K on a team of five trolls to kick down his front door and light up the neighborhood or am I gonna spend 200K on one guy with a damn good rifle to put a round in his head from the building next door then disappear?

[JonathanC]

The system is designed to be done ultra-punk or ultra-sleek.

You can have missions that involve the Manson crowd or ones that call for James Bond. Look at it from the point of view of the Johnson.

If I want to have a rival exec knocked off, am I gonna drop 500K on a team of five trolls to kick down his front door and light up the neighborhood or am I gonna spend 200K on one guy with a damn good rifle to put a round in his head from the building next door then disappear?

Honestly, I might go with the Trolls. A professional looking hit makes it fairly obvious that it was a corporate move. They'll check his enemies list, and it's a fair bet that Johnson or someone he's working for is on that list. If 5 trolls pop into his house,wreck the place, and bail, then it just looks like some kind of thrill-kill robbery/home invasion.

Misdirection FTW. Wasn't the whole point of SR that you didn't want people to know who was behind it? That was a lot easier when Shadowrunners were a bunch of neo-anarchist conspiracy theory nutjobs with ties to radical environmentalists and social justice types. If all of your runners are ex-corps dressed like refugees from The Matrix who run every job with knife-edge precision and military-style jargon over their comms, well...holes begin to form in your deniability, and you might as well just send the Red Samurai and be done with it.

[Glyph]

Yeah, I kind of miss the pink mohawks and that old Wild West feel that early Shadowrun had - not that you can't still play it, it's just been downplayed a bit. But I remember one of the old pictures, showing these gun-toting punks who had hijacked the Lone Star APC, and they were taking it out for a joyride, with this terrified LS guy strapped to the hood - I kind of liked it when it was more like that. It's no fun, to me, playing the cold hard pros. Where's the moral dilemma? I like the clash of anarchist idealism meeting the realization that you're just part of the system in the end.

[JonathanC]

It hasn't been downplayed a bit, it's been practically stripped out of the game, and honestly, I don't know how to define when/where it happened.

I want to blame the gradual rise of magic and adepts over cyber, but that's not it. Even cyberware characters tend to be variations on the same mods (wired reflexes, muscle toner, smartlink, yawn). Perhaps it's Bioware and the move towards undetectable cyber; Shadowrunners who want to blend in with everybody else.

I'm blessed with a good mix of experienced and new players in my current game, and they're all great guys. But my favorite ones are the new guys.

One of them is a human "pit fighter"...in his original build, he didn't even buy wired reflexes. His main thing is having orthoskin so he can run around shirtless charging into bullets and punching people to death. He was caught in an ambush a few weeks ago and after taking 4 boxes of physical in the initial volley, he charged through the window they were shooting out of, dove through, and grappled the shooter. He is AWESOME.

The other new player is an elf smuggler with a coke habit. The character is similarly awesome, because both players are making their decisions at least partially based on "what would be awesome?".

Not "what would be most efficient?" or "What would amuse me personally, probably at the expense of everyone else?". Both players are also teenagers. Perhaps the problem isn't the game, it's just us growing old?

[kzt]

Honestly, I might go with the Trolls. A professional looking hit makes it fairly obvious that it was a corporate move. They'll check his enemies list, and it's a fair bet that Johnson or someone he's working for is on that list. If 5 trolls pop into his house,wreck the place, and bail, then it just looks like some kind of thrill-kill robbery/home invasion.

Yup. Make it look like a couple of addicts broke-in and and killed him when it turned out the house wasn't empty.

[kzt]

Yeah, I kind of miss the pink mohawks and that old Wild West feel that early Shadowrun had - not that you can't still play it, it's just been downplayed a bit. But I remember one of the old pictures, showing these gun-toting punks who had hijacked the Lone Star APC, and they were taking it out for a joyride, with this terrified LS guy strapped to the hood - I kind of liked it when it was more like that. It's no fun, to me, playing the cold hard pros. Where's the moral dilemma? I like the clash of anarchist idealism meeting the realization that you're just part of the system in the end.

You can do a lot of cool concepts like that, but you should also be starting each game session by creating new characters....

[JonathanC]

All of this has me pondering a jump back to 3rd edition...

[Phylos Fett]

I thought the whole Life on the Edge section of the BBB was supposed to help with setting?

[The Mack]

Not "what would be most efficient?" or "What would amuse me personally, probably at the expense of everyone else?". Both players are also teenagers. Perhaps the problem isn't the game, it's just us growing old?

That's definitely a part of it.

Getting older often (not always) sees people becoming more practical.


It also has to do with your perception of "awesome". For me, James Bond has always been awesome.

Military precision, and "professional" types, have always been awesome.

Except for one game, way back in the day, when I was playing a Cyberpunk street level gangwar campaign I don't think I've ever voluntarily went for a florescent mohawk, overtly chromed out, flamboyant type character. It's just not the type of character that appeals to me to play. I'm quite happy to have that character in the group though, as it's fun roleplaying my very serious, professional style characters with someone's chromed, spiked skullcap having, dual wielding chainsaws into combat character (a friends character...didn't live very long (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif) )

At the OP, I'd just echo what others have said.

In the end, the theme of the game is in the GMs hands.

GM2: Really likes more structured campaigns. He likes taking a single organization, be it a gang, a military unit, or whatever and making the PC's part of it. He likes the control it gives him over the storyline (he's the most railroady of the GM's) and we tend to like the fact that the 'organization', whatever it is gives us a ton of cool crap that most runners never see. Our most memorable experience with this GM was the climax of a Knight Errant campaign where we ended up doing a HALO drop into the southeast asian warzone wearing powerarmour to burn out an insect hive.

Sounds like something I'd really enjoy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

[Dream79]

"Unitity! As one step together. Unity! You know its got to come."
Operation Ivy

This is one reason we stick with SR3, the transhumanist movement is present but not prevasive. Or'zet rap is coming in but not dominating the street.
Indivduality is the by word of style and anarchistic rebellion the currency of liberty.

Sometimes you just need to be punk as frag.

Yes the anti-conformist conformity.

If you want it play it that way. I think it just comes down to the world view and style of the times. Looking back things have changed quite a bit at an extremely fast pace in the past 17 years or so.

[Cardul]

I was going back through my CD collection and I found all my old Marilyn Manson albums. I was watching the Beautiful People video and that got me to think of another song, Ich Will by Rammstein, who basically rob a bank as a giant publicity stunt.

Looking through the material all I see is rules on guns and more guns. A few ideas for clothing lines: (right neo victoriana goth steampunk is so hawt these days) or (look what I bought in the earth collection shop! How does this differ from what you wear in 2008, well the sandals are not by Ecco) or the (OMG! I am standing out for wearing colors, quick back into the pinstripe suit).

I would kind of expect there to be more punk elements in Shadowrun. When was the last time a character walked into a bar to be met by a full-on freak show. How many people have room-mates that are tattooists who are into body modification and transcendentalism?

Personally, or at least how we have been playing it. The world is drab and boring with the occasional superhero out saving the world (god forbid he break type and wear spandex).

I want more drugs, I want more random violence. I want to have a reality TV show made about the characters, I want there to be hysterics, drama, and bullets. Less Shadows. Less sneaking. More brazen action. More burning like brilliant trash.

Chrysalis..thank you! I have been trying to think how to describe "Pink Mohawks"-style Shadowrun over "Tench-coat and mirror shades" style Shadowrun...and you just perfectly nailed it...thank you!

[AWOL_Seraphim]

Maybe I'm just slow (that's probably it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ), but I never noticed any shift from "chromed punk with guns" (back when I played SR2) to "black ops professional." Maybe it has to do with the way I define a shadowrunner: someone who, for one reason or another, takes a long hard look at the system and decides to tell it "frag you" and drops out. From my personal perspective, if that person wanted to blend in and do black ops in a professional way, he'd join a corporate security squad, Lone Star/Knight Errant/etc., or the army. Now, whether shadowrunning actually requires pink mohawks and enough chrome to blind people during sunny days would be, I think, every runner's choice.

Long story short, I guess there's room for both playing styles. If you want to make it really punk, I'm sure you can do it. In the campaign I'm planning, rap stopped being popular in the 1990s, and heavy metal and punk rock are quite popular in the 2070s, for instance. And that's just the beginning. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Phylos Fett]

I was thinking more about this last night (damned insomnia!) and it seems that the more sourcebooks that came out (starting back late in SR1 and a definite trend in SR2), the more info there was on security procedures and so forth; it became easier and easier for a GM to make locations secure so that shadowrunners had to try to get in and out undetected, and try to remain unseen.

As an example, when I was playing straight from the BBB in SR2, I had a player that had a cross-dressing ork sam as a character. The guy drove around in an old Kombi Van, with "Cortex Bomb" tattooed on his forehead, and was a real pyromaniac. Which was fine because it worked. But then, when I got books like Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life, Corporate Security Handbook, and Lone Star, there were all sorts of ways to screw with blatant 'runners. Over time characters started to get toned down, and act professional, get all the right gear to go full stealth, etc..

I guess things did become a bit clinical, but, I suppose, it was because everyone wanted to try out the shiny new toys in the new books (GM included). There is still a place for the over-the-top guys with pink mohawks and dressing like cowboys; it's all to do with the way you play the game. Just don't expect the GM/Johnson to offer them the big paying jobs; guys like that aren't going to be living in (traditional) Middle or High lifestyles, and won't get the jobs to pay for said lifestyles. They are going to get the more street oriented jobs, because that is the image that they portray, and the life that they lead.

[Lindt]

You can do a lot of cool concepts like that, but you should also be starting each game session by creating new characters....

See, the thing is that USED to be the game.


Glyph, I hear ya. A part of me really liked that style of CyberPUNK. Its hard to portray a setting where its really you vs 'the man', when 'the man' pays you thousands of ¥ to use rare and violent skills to their financial gain.

[JonathanC]

I was thinking more about this last night (damned insomnia!) and it seems that the more sourcebooks that came out (starting back late in SR1 and a definite trend in SR2), the more info there was on security procedures and so forth; it became easier and easier for a GM to make locations secure so that shadowrunners had to try to get in and out undetected, and try to remain unseen.

As an example, when I was playing straight from the BBB in SR2, I had a player that had a cross-dressing ork sam as a character. The guy drove around in an old Kombi Van, with "Cortex Bomb" tattooed on his forehead, and was a real pyromaniac. Which was fine because it worked. But then, when I got books like Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life, Corporate Security Handbook, and Lone Star, there were all sorts of ways to screw with blatant 'runners. Over time characters started to get toned down, and act professional, get all the right gear to go full stealth, etc..

I guess things did become a bit clinical, but, I suppose, it was because everyone wanted to try out the shiny new toys in the new books (GM included). There is still a place for the over-the-top guys with pink mohawks and dressing like cowboys; it's all to do with the way you play the game. Just don't expect the GM/Johnson to offer them the big paying jobs; guys like that aren't going to be living in (traditional) Middle or High lifestyles, and won't get the jobs to pay for said lifestyles. They are going to get the more street oriented jobs, because that is the image that they portray, and the life that they lead.

I have two problems with this:

1. It's penalizing players for being creative and trying to have some fun with their characters. Essentially, if you aren't playing Jack Bauer, you're living in a cardboard box.

2. As has already been mentioned, if you wanted a job pulled off with professional precision, you'd just use corporate black ops.