Ideal Campaign, What would yours be? Options

[Beast of Revolut...]

What would you guys love to see as a cool campaign? I was thinking about epic campaigns in which all the missions are linked together, and got the idea for this thread. Have you ever wanted to do a highly story-driven campaign which would have an overarching story arc like a TV show, or perhaps one big hidden plot like a console RPG? Maybe something like Final Fantasy?

I think a campaign like Final Fantasy 7 in which one of the characters turns out to be a clone of the villain would be neat. Or maybe one like the Granstream Saga in which one of the characters has to choose to sacrifice one of the other characters, wiping him/her from the face of history to save the world.

Or, for a more down to earth campaign, how about one in which the players are a runner team doing a prolonged campaign of investigation and attack against a group of arms smugglers? The campaign could end with a three-way shootout between the runners, the arms smuggling ring leaders and their bodyguards, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tabacco, and Firearms. At the start of that battle, the players would find out they were hired by the ATF, and now that they have found the leaders of the smuggling ring, their employers want to get rid of them so they can take credit for the bust themselves. The runners would have to fight their way out from between the ATF strike team and the equally desperate gun dealers, and find some way to keep the Johnson from hunting them down, either by killing, kidnapping, or blackmailing him.

[Kanada Ten]

As a player I'd like a reporter or Lone Star campaign. Something where the PCs slowly uncover a plot in their normal line of work. Nothing Earth shattering, but a major scam, or corporate war using gangs and syndicates as proxies. They slowly uncover higher and higher levels of corruption in the government, the Star, and everywhere. Every turn offers seduction or danger. They must ultimately deicide which side they are on before it's too late...

[shadd4d]

First Chance I have in America, I'm running something that lead up to Shockwaves. I love the book, the artwork and the story. If I can lead that and the adventues before it, the I'm happy.

Don

P.S. Don't ask about it. I'm working on translating it ( a side project) as we speak.


DAD, III

[252]

Yes, okay how does an American get the different Germany books. Yes, I don't care about learning Germany. I'm a crazy American, who is sure of some German decent in me. Who more importantly is a fanatic Shadowrunner GM/Player.

I figure if I get the books, I'll want to learn the language. And I love this stuff. It is great, and those Germans ohhh, well let's just say they seem to have a history of being efficient.

[Panzergeist]

I'd like to do an FBI campaign that would be like a cross between Call of Cthulhu and the X-files. The team would be pretty magic heavy, and the GM would institute a sanity attribute like in Call of Cthulhu, though it would actually be possible to stay sane in this game. The players would slowly uncover information about the horrors, and other even worse "old ones," and eventually they would come across situations in which the laws of physics, magic, and even mathematics seem to no longer apply, such as teleporting monsters, enchanted cyberware that is really powerful but drives the user crazy, magical time dilation, altered gravity, and two times three equalling twelve. Then they would get taken through the void of space to Betlegeuse, where they would face some sort of horrifying god-thing.

[Abstruse]

I'm doing the Bugs simultaniously with Harlequin, then the Horrors (major campaign there starting with a Carpenter's THE THING extended antartica mission starting off) and ending with Harlequin's Back, then I'm going to do a bit of election stuff (just touching everything and give the players a breather from the saving the world crap), then we're going head-long into SURGE and Shedim.

The Abstruse One

[shadd4d]

[hyzmarca]

I think that Dunkelzahn's will provides some great ideas for off-the-wall campaigns. A night in glamis castle has possibilities, as does the search for "where he Rock meets the sky", or an archeological expedition for Dragon bones. Adventures that would throw off the average character who is min-mix for survival in the sprawl are always good.

[Sepherim]

My campaign would start with normal people that, gradually, are turned into the shadows because of diferent events. Each character would hold strange secrets in their pasts that they're unaware of, and such secrets would be slowly discovered during the campaign. There would be a string that binds most of the runs together, though it would take time and investigation to unravel that string. Probably, secret organizations or cults too.

[raezyr]

I had an outline for a potentially awesome campaign that I tried to start but never finished. The backstory starts with the premise that the alien landing(s) at Roswell, New Mexico in the 1940s really happened. The government knew that the beings that were captured were obviously scouts of some sort, but not much more than that.

When the Confederacy split off from the US/UCAS, any and all classified intelligence documents that were physically stored south of the new border became CAS property and instantly became, for all intents, de-classified. Approx. ten years before the campaign starts, the documents detailing the alien landings were disseminated amongst the six major corporations of Atlanta (the setting of this campaign). Maybe it was Shadowrunners, maybe it was a rogue operative a la "Deep Throat". Either way, the big six of the South all know that the possibility of more aliens sometime soon is real, and that if the public were to know, there could be mass panic. So they each start to devise a method of either dealing with potential invaders directly or surviving in the event of war. Being megacorporations, they each only care about the safety and well-being of their own interests, hoping that the others will bow to their demands for protection against the extraterrestrial onslaught.

The way this was to be revealed to the players was through six shadowruns dispersed among other, meaningless runs and their own personal lives. They would, in time, hopefully stumble onto each of the big six's top-secret projects. But (obviously) not knowing what they were seeing, they would have to piece together the situation over time -- something like the Harlequin adventures.

The corporations (which included holdovers from current companies such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and Time-Warner) had these secret projects in what I had dubbed "The New Space Race":

* A massive underground lair with enough resources to sustain a decent-sized population of people for at least a decade (The PCs would have stumbled on it in an unrelated run against the company)

* A powerful communications tower and computer bank, located in the middle of nowhere, that is continually searching for possible alien signals to decipher and respond to with messages of peace and cooperation. (The PCs were hired for recon on this tower for a rival corp)

* A space station to be launched as an 'escape pod' (for very important people) to either the moon or Mars in the event of an attack (The PCs would either overhear rumors of something like this or actually stumble on its construction)

* A recoil-less laser weapon to be placed in orbit in preparation for the future, with technology almost as unlikely as cold fusion. (The PCs opened a packet containing blueprints for this weapon which they were supposed to deliver to their employer)

There were also a couple more which I can't recall. The climax of the campaign was supposed to revolve around the launching of the laser weapon. I had concocted a dilemma which is probably scientifically unsound but would have made for great drama: The weapon had disposable boosters that would get it into sub-orbit beyond the atmosphere, but once there, special jets would use the atmosphere itself as a second launch pad into deeper space, using an untried technology that was projected to be inexpensive and energy-saving.

During the course of the campaign, any appropriate scientific NPCs that the PCs showed these blueprints to would have been able to tell them that the second launch would essentially ignite the atmosphere and potentially render a lot of earth uninhabitable. However, this would have been related to the PCs about 36 hours before the weapon (or a test run) was scheduled for launch -- on nationwide television, no less. (Obviously, the launch was being described as an 'unmanned rocket' to the public.) Nobody working in the corp itself would listen to the PCs, and any media outlets would be powerless even if they had the evidence, so physical intrusion would be the next logical step. Knowing my players, they would likely find a better way to prevent the launch, but I think it's a cool image to think of shadowrunners bearing down on a launch pad to assault a rocket before it can lift off.

I also didn't work out all the important details such as "Why didn't any of the scientists in the corporation catch this gross error?" or "When are the aliens going to attack, if at all?" or "Do the immortal elves or dragons now about these aliens at all and how might they relate to the bugs or to magic in general?"... there are likely other logical inconsistencies as well. But it was my ideal campaign!

[Raife]

[shadd4d]

[Aesir]

If nether I nor my players had any life beyond roleplaying I´d like to GM a massive, epic campaign that span over 20 years or so taking advantage of all the source books for all the editions, and uncovering great amounts of the metaplot in the process. And I´d throw in a couple of Earthdawn scenarios that would have no direct connection, but would give the players a hint on the far away root of the events they take part in when playing Shadowrun.

[Shev]

[roryboy]

On the topic of uncovering story plot, i'm workin on a little something something where my players have been hired through a contact as muscle for a Sim-starlet who has a pretty violent stalker after her. Letters writen in blood, cadavers, crowded Sim-con™ conventions and all. Going pretty well >:D

[Userlimit]

The physical site of Seattle Shadowland site is being attacked by coalition of forces (as happened in Japan), you gotta smuggle everything out of town, and all the way down to Denver with teams on you. And eventually assist in the counter attack launched by Shadowland, breaking into some places and getting deckers to hardpoints inside, etc.

Heavy emphasis on the smuggling aspect, stopping at trucker stops, off the map smugglers hide outs/bars.

...

I also think Dunks Will has a lot of interesting plot hooks as mentioned above.. Definately a must-own book.

[Aesir]

that´s a good idea. The books give the feeling that shadowrunners stick together to some degree. But in my game other shadowrunners more often than not are antagonists. Would be nice for the players to get a chance to do something for the mutual good with their coleauges for ones, instead of just having shootouts with eachother.

[Userlimit]

Well naturally, you'd also be paid. Or that could be a twist. The Cap says you'll get paid, but it ends up that they barely have enough money to survive, and the players are left already associated with Shadowland but not getting paid.. Will they jump ship, or keep helping?

[PBTHHHHT]

[Skeptical Clown]

In my ideal game, the runners are a bunch of semi-professional shmucks who can't catch a break. Their runs succeed more often than not, but their pay often barely meets their costs, and they get suckered more often than they should. At the end of the campaign, some of them are dead; one or two might be sort of rich. Bad guys are dead, but no major forces of evil in the world are deterred. Nobody learns any lessons, although maybe the survivors kick that BTL habit or decide to get out of this crazy business. They might help out some people they like, but they didn't save the planet, the city, or even the neighborhood. If it had inspiration, it would definitely be more Cowboy Bebop than Final Fantasy.

[Pinel]

I'll start running a new SR campaign this fall after a long hiatus (work overseas far from my regular playing group) and I'm trying to come up with something a bit different. The players are heavily into fantasy RPG (which they like low-level with a role-playing emphasis) and enjoy SR for its combat and "high power" aspects. I'm developing an idea which I think they would like AND would allow their characters more mobility and versatility: a fusion between SR and the Matrix movies (snickers and comments about munchkinism are welcome... I worry about that aspect too !)

The premise is as follows: the SR universe is nothing but an alternate Matrix in which the PCs are held prisoner like billion of other pod humans. It's been about 75 real years since Neo, the Chosen One, sacrificed himself to defeat Smith and broker peace with the Machines. That event triggered a splintering of the original Matrix, with powerful component AIs (the Oracle, the Architect, the Merovingian) establishing their own virtual world(s) and networks of pod humans (bio-energy) stolen / re-routed from the main systems. At the same time, the Peace allowed free humans to expand Zion (and expand beyond it), which also led to factionalism.

The real world is now a mess of power plays, shifting alliances between human and electronic powers who compete for control of humanity - whether as electricity-producing slaves, or free followers. New models of ships now cruise the underground - and surface too - to jack into the various Matrix systems for "runs", essentially the same kind of jobs as in SR but with much greater diversity. Ship captains and their crews of jackers can be in service to one of the factions, or pirates / privateers for hire.

The "SR Matrix" would be a special test system run by the Architect AI, a setting where it can safely store those humans who exhibit similar genetic traits as Neo (manifested in SR through magic and metahumanity: that Troll is in fact a human with Neo genes who can alter his virtual strength and toughness, etc..). More and more humans are showing the ability to manipulate virtual reality, since most AIs and some human factions are running genetic programs using DNA salvaged from Neo - the hottest commodity on the market.

SR rules modifications I am working on include a system for players to re-design (within limits) aspects of their PCs before each mission, and a point system allowing them to perform the amazing feats of the Matrix movies. To keep the PCs humble, I'm also working on additional rules for adventures in the "real world" (where they are just anemic computer nerds...) and also in the hostile outside environment using special robotic suits they can jack into from their ship.

The obvious benefits of this setting (to me, anyway) is to rationalize the existence of fantasy elements in SR - which sometimes annoy me - while allowing for a lot of options in terms of adventuring environments. Players would be able to jack their PCs into exotic Matrix systems like a medieval one, any real hisrotical era of Earth or anything else I can think of. Even within the SR Matrix, I can move the PCs from one location to the next without having to rationalize how mid-level runners can perform runs around the world.

Obviously this is still being fleshed out, so I'd love to benefit from the experience and imagination of all the gamers on this forum... please bring on the comments, questions and criticism !

[Arethusa]

Pinel, spoiler tag that for the 5 people left alive who haven't see the movies.

[Pinel]

There are SR players who haven't seen all three flicks twelve times each ? You're kidding, right ?

Point taken, thanks - I'll plead the learning curve as that was my second post in the dumpshock forums...

[PBTHHHHT]

uhm.... yeah, I haven't seen it yet. Didn't feel like wasting my money on tickets after seeing the second one. So.... :|

[John Campbell]