The mall will be semi-secret; it'll be maybe 5 miles away from the Salis border. It'll be a sort of well-kept secret for Seattle, sort of like a hole-in-the-wall cafe in modern cities. They won't advertise at all in the public screamsheets, but they'll spread the word through the underworld. I think I'm nixing the whole joe consumer at the mall thing; I don't need it. After all, shadowrunners need cinnabons, too. But how do I make the shadowrunners special? Maybe I'll only have the gangster posers go to the mall. You know, corp kids who think they're cool if they wear the right stuff and go to the right mall. Actual gangsters and shadowrunners are even more worried about their reputations and will therefore work the streets for that wonderful, wonderful case of explosive ammo. This might make the players themselves feel like posers, right up until Knight Errant aggrees to pay 10000 each in certified credsticks to get rid of the problem themselves.

Also, how profitable would organlegging be if Docwagon can clone organs in the ambulance? It seems as if the only people who'd buy those are people who can't afford Docwagon, and that wouldn't be at all profitable.

You sound like you're talking about the Crime Mall in the barrens. Look it up. It WILL have miniguns (and concievably a cinnabon as well. KE (actually, more likely LS) sends the team in because they can't blow the whole place up (there are some big names which have made it politically unfeasible) and badges are unlikely to be popular. Hence, they need a team of specialists who are clearly NOT affiliated with Lone Star to do their dirty work. Make sure the team is aware this is also due to a time crunch. If they had more time, they'd probably come up with a better solution.

How are prices in the Crime Mall? I think actually having the new corporate Crime Mall that doesn't have "finder's fees" will be more profitable for both corps and criminals. It'll be placed in the Barrens, and the costs will be hidden in the window washing budgets for the mysteriously overfunded candy research subsidiary. That way, they won't have to pay off the Star because they don't go there, and they won't have to pay off the mafia, because the mafia is smart.

Sidetrack: I hope that SR4 improves the rules for miniguns, or just gives them their own rules. I especially hope that they make belt-feeding the stupid thing an option, as any kind of max ammo capacity isn't going to work well for a gat.

Once you get wound up, you might as well spend the rest of your life making with the surpression fire. Miniguns are cool. Seriously, they are. But they need to figure out some way to make the darned things usable outside of vehicle mounting.

Secondary tangent: Couldn't you 'mount' one on the ground and make with the awesome? It wouldn't be very portable, but, hey.

Miniguns aren't supposed to be portable. A gyromount is concession enough.

I forget which game company said it (Chameleon Eclectic or Steve Jackson springs to mind):

If you don't like our books, feel free to buy and burn as many copies as you want. Volume discounts are available.

So the megacorps being able to jerk around the Star would pale in comparison to their fear of runners getting the military grade stuff? I'm not sure; the Star is a corporation, and money talks to them more than anything. And what do they mean when they say that Lone Star stays out of the Barrens? They don't maintain presence, or they don't maintain an obvious presence?

Also, I was afraid of Knight Errant not wanting the mall to exist, but Ares the parent corp has a habit of paying runners in military grade weaponry, so I don't think they'd mind.

I expect Lone Star WOULD send drones over, get pictures, etc. But if the barrens are as many people seem to feel they are, Lone Star won't go in there without a dozen tanks and two dozen attack helicopters and eve then, it's for a surgical strike and nothing more. Against a crime mall especially, I can only imagine the fireworks that would ensue. It's not worth Lone Star's money to try and shut down a crime mall out in the barrens that'll cost hundreds of millions in equipment, lawsuits and deaths, when said mall will only reopen somewhere else.

Keep in mind that the place is run by megacorps, and it wouldn't be that hard for them to keep picture drones out. They'll be monitoring the radio traffic for maybe 3 blocks around, and if there's a mysterious signal coming from a rooftop that's normally accessible only by air, then they'll know. And you're assuming that the Star listens to the city more than it does to money; since it's a private contractor, I'll assume it doesn't.

You should also keep in mind that in my world, 20%-30% of guns fall off the back of trucks somewhere along the line. This mall is the megacorps' way of combating that reality, by selling them directly to the criminals and actually making money off of it. It's kind of like how movie studios sell cut-rate featureless DVD's to China in order to destroy the market there. Yes, it probably won't work that well in China, since they'll probably make perfect copies of THOSE DVD's, but gun's don't copy as easily as DVD's.

My god, I can't believe I'm making a scenario in which the megacorps are the shadowrunners' best friends.

In this case, the Man is working to keep the fence down. The Man works to make a profit in my world. In this case, that means making a mall to sell all the guns that would normally be stolen and fenced.

I'm also thinking of adding a prime runner to the campaign after a while. He'll be kind of Clockwork Orange-ish, and he'll be a gangland enforcer who does his work for fun. His archetype will be troll samurai, and every time he gets killed by the runners, he'll come back with more cyberware until he's a cyberzombie. It'll eventually be revealed that he's a hidden life receptacle for an Aztechnology blood mage, and the troll body was just a throwaway one for the mage to have fun from the safety of his pile of skulls. The first few times the troll's killed, it'll be treated as a really nice video game for the mage. Near the end, once the troll body has, like, -5 essence, he'll come down there himself to kill the runners. Or try. Which will be an awesome opportunity for the runners to make a nice million nuyen.

And do you think insect shamans should be included in Dunkelzahn's little triumvirate of evil? I think so.

Maybe I should have Knight Errant pay the runners to make surgical strikes from within the mall in order to make it easier on the team. Knight Errant will have a timetable on which certain objectives have to be completed; if they aren't completed by x time, they won't get paid for that specific mission. Not only will the runners get to loot, they'll be paid. It'll also be more realistic; I don't think that a military force that rams giant beetles with APCs is going to rely on the players for the gruntwork; the fact that they are within the mall, however, will give them unique strategic value.

I've got an idea! I'll have this be a followup to the Champion of Japanese Economic Superiority campaign. This will feature an elite team of Red Samurai hunting down the runners. The team will think of it as an honor thing, refusing help from any outside sources, even other Red Samurai. All the Red Samurai were raised on a very Lone Wolf and Cub sort of honor, but this team more so than others. I want it to end with the Red Samurai captain losing faith in combat as a whole and the Red Samurais' place in it; I have to have him come to hate his employers and everything they stand for by showing them to be dishonest and evil in their use of the Red Samurai. I want them to be double-crossed somehow, with the runners and the Red Samurai both being ambushed for some reason.

Maybe I'll have it so that the captain is sent to fight the obviously formidable runner team that stole the champion of Japanese Economic Superiority so that he could be ambushed more easily by MCT forces. What happened was that he pissed off an oyabun/MCT shareholder who tried to use his position to attract the captain's sister by kicking his ass in honorable combat at a company party. Renraku needs to un-piss off the oyabun in order to close a 50 million nuyen deal, and they need to do this by giving him the captain. Renraku does it this way so that they can disavow all involvement and not lose the loyalty of the most powerful corporate security force in the world. In the end, the captain will commit seppuku, realizing that in this age, there are few good causes to fight for and fewer honorable battles.

The Red Samurai shouldn't have much trouble just ambushing them and challenging them to honorable combat, though, maybe even dogging them through several runs. Maybe I'll have the Red Samurai give the Fixer an offer he can't refuse, meet him in public, ambush him, call the runners, and then fight it out. Whether or not he has a loyalty rating of 6, he'll try to give every indication that this isn't a trap, since if they don't come, he dies.

And I DO like the books. I just want to mix and match things as much as I want.

Three more exotic anomals that eat bugs

Solendon
Elephant sherew
Loris(Bush Baby)

That is about it for insectavor specialist totems/mentor spirits I think

I was meaning that in a sarcastic, "stop posting about animals that eat insects" sort of way.

Anyway, thoughts? A little melodramatic? I thought it would be nice to play up the conflict inherent in warriors of honor fighting for a faceless bureaucracy and to tie it in to the lack of transcendence in this hyperobjectivist world. Shadowrun is primarily dominated by two forces, both of them oppressive in their own way. On the one hand is the world of the corp, which by its very nature lowers people to the status of widgets and machines. It allows for logical analysis and sometimes even feeling, but only when it serves its ends. Like society as a whole, it purports to serve everyone in it, but ultimately serves nothing but the organizational structure. On the other hand is tradition, with its superstitions and arbitrary hierarchies of power and utter opposition to logical analysis. Neither offers freedom, and neither wants to give ground to the other. Any sort of personal glory or individuation inevitably gets swallowed up by one of these two, and in this case, it's the noble, good-hearted Red Samurai captain who gets swallowed.

Also, a few things about the Red Samurai captain. The Red Samurai guarding the Champion of Japanese Economic Superiority will all be chumps. They'll be "hand-picked" by the champion himself to be as unprofessional and disorganized as possible. He's able to read people, and can tell when they'll have a brand of suck that transcends any objective competency they could ever have. He'll pick someone loudmouthed or withdrawn or overconfident and spin it to his superiors as being "spirited" or "professional" when in reality they're just being self-indulgent idiots with a few skills. This lack of teamwork or overall competency will be encouraged so that his eventual extraction will be easier.

The Red Samurai captain will be different. Yes, he's not a supersoldier or anything, but he's a believer, and he has made it his duty to handpick his team to be as perfect as possible, regardless of anything. His will be one of the few to have metahumans, and the only reason he doesn't have a troll or an ork is because the company would fire him. He's more Ares Firewatch than Red Samurai. He's nice to animals and even the poor, a rare trait among the corporates, and is polite and engaged in all his social interactions. Which should make it even more of a tragedy once he commits seppuku over the general lack of goodness. He's basically Ogami Itto without the revenge complex. Then again, he might take revenge on the company for killing his teammates.

Then again, should I have him commit seppuku? He's stopped believing, but I don't think he's so weak as to give up on everything once he turns his back on obedience. What do you think?

IMO (and this is only my opinion), the Red Samurai aren't actually samurai and aren't really restricted to bushido. Sure some might (this particular gentleman especially), but I don't see that you have to apply it to Red Sams JUST because they're Red Sams.

Now that doesn't mean they couldn't be assigned to do it for another reason, to demonstrate to the shadow community why Renraku is so bad ass, because the leader is personally pissed off and these guys are doing this on personal time, because there's some political background preventing a proper deployment or requiring a showdown, etc.

Do you think the leader will kill himself? I think he'd make a good NPC, but perhaps one that would overshadow the PC's.

If he overshadows the PCs, you could always find an excuse for him to kill himself then...

What would he do after going ronin? I imagine him attempting a run against the Mitsuhama guy, assuming that the Mitsuhama guy doesn't get his ass killed in the confrontation anyway. I'm wondering when I should have Mitsuhama security break into the scene and go for the captain. I'm imagining a scenario in which a sniper lines up his sight, a teammate pushes the captain out of the way, and the teammate has his head taken off instead.

I think I should have him start a Barrens gang called the Red Ronin that he hand-trains. He'd be the toughest dude in the Barrens, besides some shadowrunners, and he'd be able to hold its loyalty easily.

As for a campaign nuisance idea, I'm thinking of having a villain be an Aztechnology blood mage who runs a subsidiary of Universal Omnitech. He'll spend most of his time in a troll's body whose soul has been ripped out and possibly fed to a Horror killing people for fun.

The troll will have been a badass gangland enforcer who was great at the pubs and enforced for the sake of fun as much as money. He could have been big and everything, but he was much more content killing people at street level. One day, years ago, he developed an inexplicable wanderlust and wandered away from the Barrens. He came having classical music played on his cyberarm and citing poetry while torturing people in sophisticated ways Clockwork Orange style. Very un-enforcer like. Which points the inquiring mind inevitably towards possession by a blood mage.

He'll first attack the players on a whim. They'll be the first people to kill him. Every time they kill him, he'll come back with more cyberware than before until he's a cyberzombie. After you make sure to destroy him one last time, he'll have his pet cyberzombies/blood spirits capture one of the players on a daily errand and send the players a video e-mail of the PC hogtied among myriad blood sacrifices that are similarly hogtied along with a map pointing straight at a UO subsidiary. When they come to him, he'll let the PC go and have a straight up fight with them. Keep in mind he'll have an initiate grade of at least 8, so it'll be fair. Plus, he'll have blood spirits and cyberzombies. This will be the ultimate act of fun and blood sport for him.

His history will be that he grew up in Aztlan in an oppressively Catholic family. Because of this, they hated his magical talent and tried to repress it. Darke sensed this and, through dreams and astral visions, turned him onto the path of blood. His first blood ritual will be the sacrifice of his father in order to power a bigass fireball that burns his house down. He worked in his UO fiefdom during the time of the blood mage purge, so he'll be safe the whole time.

His demeanor will be sort of like that of a Joss Whedon serial killer. He'll have quotes such as, "I tried human feeling once. It didn't make me happy, which is funny, since happiness is a human emotion. I have anger, though. Anger's a good start." And when the player first wakes up, the blood mage will have an illusory suit of human flesh a la Silence of the Lambs. He'll ask the player what he thinks of the suit, "What do you think of the human skin suit? Too psychotic? Not psychotic enough? I think I need a dead puppy hat to round it out; it just doesn't work on its own." He'll constantly seem to descend into psychotic self-observation, only to break out of it laughing at the PC.

As a followup spinoff campaign, I'm thinking of having one where blood mage and his lackeys escape from Aztlan at the time of the purge. They'll try to make it to a safehouse in Glow city; they'll have to make it past border patrol and avoid runner teams trying to become overnight millionaires with his head. And by lackeys, I mean Jaguar Warriors, multimillion dollar cyberzombies, and possibly another blood mage.

You want to make your Shadowrunners unique?
Shadowrunners, break in to secure facilities, steal/break things, kidnap people, plant false information, and other wonderful industrial espionage jobs - and they do all this right under the nose of Joe Public. The fewer people who know about a job well done, the longer the 'runner lives without fear of reprisal.

Sure it's not all James Bond flare, or GI-Joe fantastical gunfights. It's not about roaming around in big super mechs blowing up your enemies and creating carnage. It's about surving the streets while not having to live in the gutter.

Corporations hold public stock, to be directly involved (or even accused to being involved) in illegal operations effects your stock rating. Stock brokers will not invest in a company they don't trust, and companies who openly run illegal activities can't be trusted. Extra-territorial does not mean you can get away with anything under your roof, it just means you have a better chance of covering it up.

Insect spirits are hunted by any non-insect aligned magician - they are beyond evil and need to be eradicated.

Blood Mages are hunted down for they negative image they give to all magic users out there.

This sort of far out sci-fi/fantasy - it's gotta be better than a movie - type hype is half the reason why I left IRC Shadowrunning. Shadowrun is about keeping it real, keeping it fun, and keeping your head for another day.

Any event that publicly exposes a Shadowrun is always a fatal mistake. For the target, for the client and most importantly for the runner - unless you want to spent your whole running life holled up in some dive in the Barrens. Police have effective methods of tracking down criminals, and unlike the big movies, governments and corporations aren't required to cover up for a shadowrunners gaf... in fact, the more chance they have to peg the runner is a lone wolf scapegoat, keeping the eyes away from them, the better.

Corps don't help runners, they use runners. The moment they no longer serve a purpose is the moment they dissapear. The only hope a Shadowrunner has to survive is to be used and hope they will live to see another day - and someone get out a little ahead of where they are now in the process.

If you're not playing this kinda game, then you're probably looking for a different - more cyberpunk style RPG.

It's just the blood mage. The blood mage isn't learning about the runners by watching the trids; he's effectively part of the street community by possessing this guy's body. This is a personal thing for him that comes about almost by accident.

What Dranem has written is quite possibly the best description and defintion of Shadowrun that I've seen so far in my entire playing of Shadowrun. This is exactly what happens in the (SR) real world. Its hard to get a lot of players (and GM's) to understand this because of the movies they've seen.

Course, from your response, I'm pretty sure you didn't catch any of it

The thing is, the mage is very secretive. As far as UO knows, he's just a cybermancer. Which inevitably gives him great job security, even if he's found out by his own company. I don't think that leading a troll away from his life through magic is going to get an 8th grade initiate to even break out in a sweat. He doesn't even need to kidnap people, since he could just make them walk away themselves. Besides, he's a blood mage, he's going to have crazy, hard-to-fulfill interests. Why introduce blood magic and cybermancy if you're not going to play them up to their fullest?

I think this is a problem of style, not of plausibility, And the game's inevitably going to be my style. The mage could easily accomplish this stuff with his skills. There is no logical reason for him being unable to take his relationship with the runners above street level.

<<Why introduce blood magic and cybermancy if you're not going to play them up to their fullest?>>

Blood mages, Insect shamans, Toxic shamans, Twisted Path Adepts, MBW Sammies, CyberZombies...ectera

Those are all supposed to be used by the Game Master to produce a plot, to give goals, not intended to be played by players. The runners are made to DESTROY these things, thats why it wouldn't 'work' as a runner team member.

And really, no matter how you spin the thing it doesnt work, or is too silly. Not because its not 'realisitc', or 'plausable' but because it simply clashes with the senses.

I'm not introducing him as a team member. He wants to kill them. Where the hell do I suggest he join the team?

He's the leader of their cybermancy team. There's no bad publicity if the public doesn't know.

Blood Magic isn't about publicity, it's about the warped way that the mage empowers magic. Joe Public wouldn't even need to know - but any mage/shaman worth their salt in assensing auras would pick up the aura of a Blood Mage in a heartbeat. The result would be either a cringe in fear or a desire to remove the abomination from all that is influential.

That's the same with cyberzombies. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to thing that a cybermancy clinic will have a blood mage; it'll only make, like, an extra 2 percent on the "sins against nature-ometer."

Note, I dont mean to be 'mean' or 'attacking' in my posts, just letting you know.

First of all, like D said, Blood Mages are like carriers of the plauge, except they like it. Whoever owns him (and this is something to note, he wont be free, not that kind of power) wont send him out freely like that.

Also, consider that a.) Cyberzombies cost not only the NUYEN to build, (were talking 6.00 essence or more of killing ware, usually costing around 2-3 mil in SR3), b.) The willing people, and b.) the 'magic' behind it all if I remember it correctly. I dont have the books on me now, but I believe theres a ritual to building a CZ.

Factor that in with your game. That and your average 4-6 prof rating spec ops corp blackout team is cheaper and as efficent as 2-4 cyberzombies and a blood mage. That and you cant hide these fuckers anymore than you can hide 2-4 astral blackholes and something that looks like walking necrosis.

Aren't cybermancy teams pretty much left alone by the suits as long as they bring in the results? I'm aware that the binding ritual is really hard; that's why they could conceivably need a grade 8 initiate for it, and that's why they'd leave one alone even if he was a blood mage.

I have a new idea for a one-shot with prerolled characters. It's really street-level. The McGuffin will be a psycho street sam friend who loved a smoothie shack in his area of the Barrens. It gets blown up by a bunch of Ancients, so naturally, he guns them down and pisses on their corpses. The problem is, one of the kids was the leader's younger brother, and so, she's out to kill him. The group has to protect him while he hunts down and kills the leader in single combat so that the other members of the gang will leave him alone. The psycho street sam will be one of the player characters.

I don't concur with your detractors that corporations won't deal with Blood Mages and Insects. They've done it before, they're doing it now, and they'll do it in the future. Ares has an Insect Spirit division. Aztechnology has Blood Magi on the board of directors.

The average joe on the street looks at Blood Magic and goes "Eeek! Blood!", the average civilian looks at an Insect and goes "Eeek! The UB is back!" but the fact is that like most things it's actually much more complicated than that. The Blood Speakers and Insects can come up with a lot of power, at the cost of sacrificing life force to external forces. But life force can be grown in vats and your enemies have a substantial amount of life force you probably wish they didn't have. So from the standpoint of a corporation, a Blood Mage or Insect Hive really can just be a win/win situation as far as their power bargains are concerned.

What they can't be is good publicity. Blood Magic gets bad press outside of Central America, and Insect Spirits have a serious PR issue world-wide. So if a corp wants to get anywhere with these guys, they'll have to keep it on the down-low. The only good Insect Asset is a secret Insect Asset.

---

There is the problem though. Once the corporation makes their Blood or Insect allies secret, they've protected them from oversight - even their own oversight. Like how the CIA maintains prisons in Eastern Europe and Central America that the US Congress doesn't have access to. That secrecy by definition means that the Insect Spirits and Blood Magi who work for corps have something of a free hand.

In order to give themselves plausible deniability for whatever the Blood Mage is doing, they've made it so that they often really don't know what he's doing. Universal Omnitech forks over the yens, and the Blood Mage completes contract work on their behalf, and they really don't keep close tabs on him the rest of the time. He could be secretly in league with the horrors or something and they wouldn't even know.

---

Now on a specific note, UO and Aztechnlogy split up on fairly poor terms and became competitors. Any Blood Mage working for UO is going to be an EX-Aztechnology Blood Mage. That's fairly important, UO would have purchased itself a known traitor during the shake-up as part of their attempt to replicate in-house all the things they used to contract the Aztechs to do for them.

So that guy is by defintion:

a> Not to be trusted.
b> Irreplaceable.

Fun times.

-Frank

That's why he'll have his little fiefdom. He could go Hannibal Lecter on the middle manager working over him and create a blood spirit doppleganger of him, and even if UO found out, they wouldn't give a fuck. A middle manager pushes papers; a blood mage gets things done that defy the laws of nature and metaphysics. Plus, he'll be ultra-secretive about anything that he does and he'll mostly sacrifice the SINless. Which helps with the secrecy. Any mysterious disappearances could be easily blamed on random Barrens violence or Tamanous. He would make a GREAT villain.

Plus, he's not the type to be interested in corporate politics. He makes lots of money, and he's free to kill people. His life is good. He really IS like Hannibal Lecter; he has no conscience, but when it comes to killing, he only kills people that make you hurl. He'll hunt the free-range rude, and in the grim darkness of the near future, there are many free-range rude.

Also, I think I'll call the street sam Patrick McGuffin.

Dear Emo Samurai. Do not listen to the word of the unwise, those who say that pure SR is such and such. One of the main virtues of the game is that it can be played in many different styles.

One group may go gritty cyberpunk and suffer chasing rogue androids under the rain, another could play a gang game.
People can and do play special forces, adept elves from the tir, stuffer shack clerks, docwagon meds, redsams, cyberpyrates, paranimal hunters, natgeo photographers, spies, ecoterrorists and urban brawl teams.

Etc.

As long as the gaming groups is interested, there is no SR karma police going to check on your game.

I think there is logical consistency in your ideas, and they sure look fun to play!

Now, where did I put my power armor...

Cheers,

Max

Ok, I do not know anybody who plays a group of Stuffer shack clerks, but the rest still cut it.

Cheers,

Max