My players are playing wageslaves. One is in sales the other a developer of drone protocol software. Both work for the same company.

Their first run took them to Vegas for the Consumer Electronics show. The last run took them to Detroit for a sales pitch to KE/Ares.

They won a minor contract with KE.


I'm running low on ideas. Basically i want to get the characters fed up enough with their company that they take to the shadows.

Any one got any ideas for a couple of low level scenarios?

Have something go wrong and have their bosses pass the blame on to them. Or run them up against a petty bureaucrat who makes some otherwise simple task a nightmare to complete.

Make them believe a up and coming promotion is coming their way, then they get passed over due to someone's maledictions. Repeat.

A disgruntled employee flips out at the office one day, or have you already done that?

Some bigger company that wants their invention/contracts/whatever the PCs helped with to make the company better. So the other company takes theirs over and they get downsized and thoroughly shafted in the process. Maybe the company requires them to have cyber implanted, a somewhat forced sale, right before they shitcan them, too, so they have huge debt hanging over their head.

The company enters in to a byzantine Quality Initiative that triples their work load mostly with mindless busy work (filling out forms, then more forms to document the forms they just filled out, etc.) and puts a fresh out of college CPA/MBA with no real world experience but loads of half baked academic management ideas incharge of their division. On top this the new boss is a petty bureaucrat, a rabid cost cutter (ie he starts rationing basic office supplies), and a credit stealing ticket puncher only worried about his own advancement.

Not just an internal disgrace, make it a public disgrace. They get blamed from something really bad, like a faulty drone explodes at a conference and people die. The players know the accident was CLEARLY due to something their boss did, like disregard proposed safety protocol or something out of greed, and then the runners get blamed for it. It's all over the news. Even friends and family are humiliated and try to distance themselves from them. No one will ever hire them again. They get sued to oblivion by victims.

After months (you can fast-forward a bit) of being in the gutter flipping burgers, a fixer approaches them and tells them he could use people with their skillsets. Thus begins the shadowrunner life.

Nah, the public disgrace is too cliche and it reeks of railroading.

My have them put a new drone combat drone running their protocol through field tests in the CAS. The field test is a part of a sweeping new tough-on-crime initiative and consists almost entirely of gunning down random SINless people in a barrens area. The idea is that if one kills a lot of random SINless people one is bound to get some hardcore criminals too.

Now, at this horrific display they may get a conscious and do something stupid. At which point you can have Ranger Walker save them since they are in the CAS. However, at no point should their actions halt the slaughter. If they go along with the action, then the public can find out and both KE and the polititions who authorized the mass murder can put the blame squarely on them so that they find themselves wanted for several hundred seperate counts of murder in the CAS. Give them a chance to escape to a different jurisdiction, of course.


Bugs could work too. Have the programmer be tasked with modifying the new drone protocol for use with a snake-eyes/skillwire system to control living people. Then have them installed in flesh forms who were once people. Let them watch screaming and crying men women and children be invested at an Ares Insect Spirit research facility.

Ares is working with the bug spirits?

No.

The Bug Spirits are working for Ares.

Doing what? Where's this mentioned?

You could always have a group of shadowrunners performing an extraction within the company and are looking for inside help with the job. IT would pay well. If they take it, you could hook them with the money, or could be found out by corp sec. They might like the thrill of the run. or things in the company get sour, benefits are begin dropped, programs lose funding and make things mundane there.

You could put them in a situation of Sexual Harrasment homosexual style wherein they would probably refuse, get put in worse positions, finally something goes wrong. Big PR scandal ensues, they become the corporate scapegoat. Hung out to dry, complete paraihs. All corporate assets are frozen. ie housing, transportation, income etc etc. All from a jaded/jilted admirer/lover.

dude, you mean you have players who WANT to be wage slaves and you are having trouble getting them to get into the shadows? They want to worry about who took the last of their creamer in the fridge or who's got the dry ink cartirdge for the copier?????

Tell me I read that wrong.

Instead of inflicting office woes on them, show them the rest of the world. maybe the shop keeper at the local coffee shop is having trouble with go gangers, that nice lady down the hall is afraid her boy if falling in with the wrong crowd and she'd like you to get him back. The elven couple upstairs would like you to drive their daughter to ballet practice and fialed to mention humanis is planning to picket the school.

hell the world outside the office is what matters.

The elven couple upstairs would like you to drive their daughter to ballet practice and fialed to mention humanis is planning to picket the school.


I like this one.

I'd like it even better with the following modification:

Humanis, rather than being stupid, has let it slip that they plan to picket, but oops - they're caught up in traffic. All the "humble lesser race" parents will have pulled their kids, the only ones left are the arrogant ones. So they send in some street muscle to kill all the metas there.

Looks like it's up to two wageslaves to save the day. And they do so, (Use some of the weakest gangers you can come up with,) and are generously rewarded with by the citizen's watch, school, etcetera.

Then they find their jobs downsized, because their boss, or their boss's boss is a huge Humanis guy, and was involved with the planning of the run the wageslaves bungled. Bam, they have cash, they have a huge infusion of karma (both the stastical and less-stastical forms,) no jobs, and are out on the streets.

Real life factoid: in my past job my company was getting monthly feeds from a data vendor, $5,000 a month for the last 12 years. That's $720,000 of DVDs I had sitting in my desk drawer.

Something like that is a _lot_ more than most shadowruns go for.

Maybe their company is getting hosed because they don't have this kind of data, so the characters get recruited by their boss to go do something about it. They get the data, now they have to figure out if they want to give the data to their boss for an attaboy -- or sell it for a few year's salary.

The data I was getting was monthly data on about a sixth of all the home mortgages in the US. There are similar data vendors for credit cards, insurance, credit risk, marketing spend, consumer preferences, etc. I'm telling you, the latest technological breakthrough is chump change next to 25 years of people's supermarket shopping habits.

==Ed

you want them to be fed up of being wageslave? Well that's wasy. Just keep running the obiring office work everyday. "OK, you're off the call. Now you've got that TPS report to file . Roll Logic+Corp Politics . How many hits?"

"Your boss walks up ' yeah... umm.. I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday. So if you could just be here.... say about 10, yeah, that would be great . thanks"

About 2 hours of that and they should be foaming at the mouth, looking for an arms dealer so that they can go postal. The rest will take care of it's self.

Or you could just have the second crash hit and wipe away their identities.

I have to say that the identity wipe was one of the first things I thought of when this thread started. You can fire them, piss them off, whatever you want to do, but in the end if they still have SINs, all they have to do is dust off their resume and find a different job.

I would think that after a few hours of you describing their daily lives to them, and having them roll "make new pot of coffee" a few times, the question of how to get them to break out of the wageslave life will answer itself.

Joe wage slave (NPC) surged & has been hiding it, with the corp's help of course. PC's are caught in the middle of a hostile extraction of Joe. Realizing he's the target of the extraction, but not knowing why, the PC's attempt to save their coworker & are mistaken by corp sec as either part of the extraction team or as another extraction team, thus becoming hunted by both their own corp and the extracting party.

Cool

Thanks for the ideas.

I've come up with a couple of ideas loosely based on your suggestions.

The drone going bad was a good one. Also the exctraction of a changeling could be cool.