Greetings
I have been paying attention to this forum for about a month or two now and I have noticed alot of interesting posts on rules, errata, and even some source material.

I have been wondering what people have done now that the new edition has come out, campaign wise. What games have you run, played in, or you think would cool to run.

Go crazy

I'm about to start a magical campaign set in the Barrens. Guess my players are about to "test" the apparent increased lethality of magic (not that it wasn't deadly before). I'm looking forward to it.

Reminds me of a barrens campaign that I ran. It was centered on a small nieghborhood called the "downs". It was really quite fun but after a while most of the players wanted to switch to a differant game, mostly becuase of SR3's clunkyness in the system department. I had thought of picking it back up but I came up with another idea at last second.

I had intended to run my players through the video game System Shock, it takes place in late 2072, and the tech is right on par with SR4. The only problem is that we started other games so mine got bumped off the queue. ah well.

We run a non-standard game. We're running a non-magical game with no metahumans, magic, technomancers, etc. We do borrow heavily from the corporate politics of the canon material, though.
Our game takes place in New(er?) Orleans, and in our timeline the flooding that took place in 2004 is a regular enough occurrence that vast stretches of the city have been abandoned to squatters and gangs, and the only place safe from a flood is in a corporate archology.
We also acknowledge some 2005 roots to the megacorps of 2070. Lonestar is a descendent of Haliburton, for example.

Current campaign is set in London, with an emphasis on the subjectivity of reality in the 2070s. Two of the characters are jacked into Matrix games at all times. One of the street sams has built her life around being a "Ghost". Not a member of the Tir special forces, a secret agent of Terran Defense from Worlds of Galaxycraft. Another character believes that his magic functions because he is a Legendmasters Wizard, and runs a reality filter in AR while moving through his everyday life.

So far, the players have been mixed up with fallout from a schism in the Lord Protector's Office. They interupted a blood letting ceremony by some official druids, but only because they were tracking down a stolen item that was being used in it.

The players also got mixed up in the financial shakedowns of the collapse of the Universal Brotherhood. They were hired to back up one of the insect shamans who ended up getting financially shafted against another insect shaman who had run off with large amounts of money when the UB got shut down and the totem-truce fell apart. Here's an actual discussion between some of the players at the end of that mission:

P1: "And we are never doing that again!"
PL2: "I thought you didn't mind working for insect shamans..."
P1: "I don't. If that kid wants to make zombies, that's his lookout. I'm talking about escort duty. Being respnsible for someone else's safety for 48 hours straight is way too stressful for that kind of money."

---

The characters are just starting to get invited to fancy parties, earlier on they were living on the street and managed to steal a couple of pallets of Kreuspex Cereal, and eating sugar pellets for every meal.

-Frank

I started a game in Hong Kong (before I found out it's going to be in Runner's Haven's Cool!) It is going to focus on the Triads and the Mystical beings pulling their strings.
I really like the South East Asian setting because there is so much opportunity to do weird runs in strange places and not have it seem so forced.

Right now, my campaign is about the rise of a corp, their triad&dragon help, and the runners being paid to stop their rise in seattle. They are also members of a small time gang trying to muscle into the barrens, and pay for their addictions all at once. I then bring in the merc in the groups past, by having the big bad guy, and his main henchmen being his old commander and squad-mates back when he fought in bogata (which is where he gained his addiction to novacoke). Through in a wanna-be sam who slots BTLs based from 1700 japan, and a technomancer who is starting up his own tribe and a small info-corp, and thats what I got so far.

Soon (chargen and introductory run this weekend) I'll be starting a campaign set in Halley, Antarctica, which has grown to quite a big place since the 2062 (?) T:WL post. Alot of underwater oil/mining rigs, alot of mining bases, some weird research, not to mention eco-terrorists and illegal underground miner's trade unions. I think the player (this is a one-on-one) will be hired by an EVO Johnson for runs mostly against S-K and Ares.

I am running a campaign for 5-7 people right now that revolves around a disease outbreak. The Government (UCAS) has a vested interest in this and is testing the outbreak using government officials of the CIA and such to test the product on the lowly non having right-less people of the UCAS (the SINless) through illegal low grade bioware. An up an coming corporation is the producer (one i made up) Group Medical. This long story line ties in closely to a runner that has an unknown drake bloodline that will show as time progresses. He will be a pawn in a large war that will be raging between awakening drakes around the world as the DF and other corps send out capture/hit squads to find the drakes, once the rift in astral space brakes upon their full awakening. He unknowingly has been given an artifact that will tell him what the true nature of a drake is when he gets near them as the great old President D has foreseen.

And of course there are side stories for the people that don't have as involved backstories and as their backstories progress they will be tied in further to the plot.

With my own current campaign I have focused heavily on the conspirtorial nature of shadowrun. Layers upon layers of schemes and lies. Smoke and mirrors.
I started everyone out with templates it being a new system and all.
I have so far...
The Face: A runner with amnesia who is trying to find out his past and why he started the campaign in a box being delivered by the rest of the runners in the group.
A smuggler: One of the two surviving members of the group. THe group was ambushed and the rest of thier team was killed in the crossfire. She is out for revenge against the people who killed her lover(one of her former teammates)
An Gunslinger Adept: Another Survivor. He is also out for revenge agaisnt the people who killed his teamates and recently his brother(another player who had to leave the game)
Another Gunslinger Adept: A college proffesser who shadowruns because he wishes to uncouver all he can about metahumans from ancient times. He was recently hired to fill the gap.
A Combat Mage: An albino black ork human looking elf poser combat mage who is addicted to stims and a newbie runner learning the ropes.

Each game has been better than the last and so far I have been able to start pushing my limits of what to throw up against them without killing them off way to easily. As I have been going I have been assembling my own little list of house rules so when we reach the meat of the campaign it will be alot smoother.

My Cam Pain is going to be taken outside of the Barrens and going to live in the flashyness of the DownTown Core with sevral visits to Asia.

My SR4 campaign is back-dated to the year after the crash, just after matrix connections have been re-established in all major areas. This allows me to play out a lot of the post-crash stuff, plus has teh added benifit that I don't have to deal with five years of unkown history. The game is set in Europe, and The characters are all members of a travelling circus. The circus makes a loop around europe once a year, so I get to take them wherever I want. Their Fixer knows they travel, and sets tehm up with work wherever they are that week.

I plan on involving them in a lot of S-K vs. Neonet competition over the wireless matrix grids in Europe. Their first run, and campaign overarcing story, involved recovering the Joyeuse, the sword of charlemagne, and protecting it for the next several months, until they get to Prague. Additionally, the party technomancer Is a con artist who cheats people out of their money with fake divinations. Imagine the fun when she discovers that she has the Info Sortiliage echo.

I have a run based off the real life city of Varosha which you can read about here. In the real life city the Turks evacuated a city during a war one day and nobody has been back in 30 years. In the article they mention brand new cars sitting in showrooms, etc.

In my version I moved the island to the Carribean. Half the island is a great beach low area, the other half jungle mountains. (10-20 square miles total). Horizons had a big gamling center beach resort on the island but some Islanders started to grumble about changing their way of life, etc. A group of about 12 shamans got some followers and made life and business difficult. After a large tidal wave came in and killed lots of vacationers and Horizons responded with chemicals weapons the UN stepped in and declared a ceasefire (lead by Amazonia who wanted the nature friendly shamans to win) and kicked Horizons out until the matter could be resolved peacefully. The UN subcontracted out the peacekeeping mission to Aztechnology and that's the way it's been for the last 30 years or so. The islanders are still trying to kick out the UN and the Corps so they can join the League of Carribean Nations.

Half the Island contains an abandoned city. A wealthy mafia man who in his younger days vacationed there remembered extremely nice cars at the showroom a week before that half of the island was evacuated. He hired the PC's to investigate and try to get any cars off the island that they could.

It's fun because I didn't plan any specific way for them to get the cars out of this city and off the island. It's totally up to them with no DM railroading going on. So far they snuck in and took video of the cars, etc. Then got out. Now inbetween sessions they are planning ways to get the cars out of the city.

It's also nice that it can be a normal extraction run or the PC's can choose to get involved in politics. Plans range anywhere from driving them at top speed to the south mountainous half and hiding them until they can be smuggled out to bribing Aztech people to look the other way while they load them onto a large boat and just drive them away. There is also the political options of siding with one of the two teams and taking the car as spoils after a victory.

I completely agree. Since Shadowrun is set on a futuristic Earth, it requires no railroading at all. If the players want to refuse a job and go to Borneo to fight in the Cola Wars, they can do that. If they don't want to participate in any particular set of events, they really don't have to. The world is really big, and there isn't any part of it that they can't flee to in a couple of hours.

Shadowrun has a world where the characters really can just not go to whatever adventure you have planned. That can be difficult sometimes, especially for a new GM, but the rewards are substantial. Unscripted play sessions often make for the best cooperative storytelling.

-Frank

The only acceptable railroading is when the group has goals and one PC doesn't agree to those goals. When I DM I stick the focus of the plot to whatever the group agrees to do. If one guy wants to run off and rob a jewlery store because it pays better than smuggling I don't usually let him. But only because he's being a distraction.

My PCs are an independent team of Chinese and Japanese kawaruhito in Saigon. Recently they were hired to defend a cache belonging to a crew of ork Chinese pirates from looters. The cache was in an old concrete bunker in the jungle.

If you're really looking to open up that can of worms, consider the Shadowrun MUSH. Last I heard, they were still in SR3 but gearing up for SR4 deployment.

Once I'm done with finals, I'm getting some of my friends and I'm going to run a game heavily inspired by the Ghost in the Shell tv series. A few of them are very experienced gamers so I'm confident in giving them a budget to outfit a building and build a government paramilitary unit that doesn't exist.