I don't particularly like vampires, but for some reason I use them a lot in SR. (I've actually run more vampire related games in SR than I ran in Vampire: TM, and I ran Vampire: TM for awhile. It was a fine system without vampires.) One thing I realized was that if I was going to be using a lot of Vampires, I was going to have to change the rules around a bit. The book vampire is fine if you meet one vampire every so often, otherwise it just comes off feeling very... generic.

I took a page from WW blood points, and let vampires "spend" essence to activate their powers. Increased Physical Attirbutes wasn't always active, they had to burn a point of essence to get it going. Regeneration was the same way, one point of essence for a wound level. Vampires could be baddies, but they couldn't keep it up for very long (at least not without feeding), and activating powers took an action. The only Always Active powers were therm vision and their immunities. By making vampires a little more scalable (meaning their power level and not the ease at which they could be climbed) and more customized, I got a lot more mileage out of them. I never had a player play one, but I wouldn't have been against it. I think it came out pretty balanced. (I had more detailed files, but I've been on a year or so break from SR and I'm working from memory here.) I also mixed up the critter powers a bit. They all started with the vision mod, the immunities and the ability to spend essence for Str or Regen. After that, their powers could express in different ways (similar to WW disciplines, though instead of "bloodlines" it was variant strains of HMHVV... which is kind of the same thing).

Two of my favorite games I ran were vampire-related Shadowruns. The first, the runners are hired to kill a vampire. As they start hunting him down they figure out he was infected a few years ago when he was in high school, and he's been going back there and infecting other kids. It started out with his goth friends, and then it became whoever they thought was cool. About this time, an elf student jai-lai player started expressing her physical adept abilities. I called that one Brittany the Vampire Slayer. It was a more serious game than the title implies, but we had a lot of fun. The vamps weren't really badasses, they were basically a caricature of a LARP Vampire game I used to go to. (They even based their "undead" society on White Wolf's published line of games.)

The second one I ran a couple of years later. It was a Lone Star game with the pc's playing homicide detectives investigating the death and crucifixion of a jazz club owner who was a vampire. Almost all the vamp npcs from the first game made an appearance in the follow-up. The victim was the Johnson from the first run (as well as the original infector of the target). This also dealt more with a vamp fixer named Ivy who was a go-to guy and neutral party for the HMHVV's in the city. Ivy used his Immunity to Poison as a way to indulge his affection for snakes, mainly cape cobras. Most of the high school vamps that had survived the previous run were back, older and wiser now, as well as a Jesuit vampire hunter who was hunting his infected ex-wife. There was also another run in with one of my favorite npcs, Living Dead Girl, aka Teresa, who was a human relative to a pack of ghouls and for some reason immune to their expression of the disease. Most people went through her to dispose of bodies. LDG had no cyberware or magic powers, she was just related to ghouls. Sort of Addam's Family.