*Yawn*

Damn you guys are bored.

Anyway, the best way to convey atmosphere is to give each place/person/thing a specific charecteristic, and flesh them out from there. For instance, you need to add atmosphere to a bar. An easy way to make it distinctive would be to give a smell. Let's say the bar has a specialty drink called a Totem Twister, which has a lot of cinnamon mixed into it. Due to the popularity of the Totem Twister, the bar has a heavy cinnamon scent that pervades the area.

There. Now, rather than 'some dingy bar', you have your players talking about 'that bar with the cinnamon'. Same thign can easily be done for charecters - maybe this one fixer always wears blue, or a street kid from done by the docks always smells of fish. Or an arms dealer always refers to his weapons as 'his lovely babies'.

When playing with new players, I often do a 15 minutes of introduction to cannon material before the games really start.

For instance: a 15 minutes on "CatCo", "What the Seraphims are", "Who is Leonard Aurelius", "What are the rumors concerning Lucien Cross"

Sometimes I even do "quizzes" that awards the players a few karmas if they got a lot of good answers.

Yeah, seen all of the artwork.... but like you said, artwork doesn't always portray shadowrun. so right back at you brainiac.

anyhow ... started a new thread so we don't have to bother these nice people.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=13684

Another note in regards to the original question...

My wife said one thing she enjoys about my game (which isn't quite SR yet. We're starting the timeline over, starting from 1885.) was that all the NPCs have their own stuff going on, and plots that advance that she the player knows about, but her character doesn't. We can see this in the metaplot, where crazy stuff goes on all the time. As the GM, your job is to continue that metaplot all the way down to the bum on the street. Shadowrunners conduct activities with colorful characters, and very few of them are static and sedentary. The fixer should disappear for a month, your Johnson should call up to enquire after someone completely unrelated to anything you're doing, your talismonger should drop a "gift" in your pocket as you leave the store. And all of these actions should have some meaning completely beyond the understanding of the runner, actions that, depending on how they turn out, have profound effects on the lives of the NPCs. (This also gives the PCs a great chance to upgrade NPCs for free. After all, if you investigate the name and give your J the low down for free, he might just owe you a favor.)

....uhhh, looks like the atmosphere here is getting a bit thick & personal.

Think I'll head to another thread.

No James, don't do it... Stick to kinder gentler...

A good way to create atmosphere is to have a small group of assholes sit down in the booth with the runners and the Johnson and start arguing about something in loud and heated tones.

Wow... deja vu.

I like the idea of having songs that represent certain locations, consider it yoink'd.

Definitely have set descriptions for key locations. That way the players can notice changes too...
"There's a new bartender swabbing glasses, and she actually smiles as you walk in. You settle into your usual spot before you even notice that the familiar smell of old beer and second-hand smoke has been replaced by dead roses and second-hand smoke"

Sorry, it bounced off the barrier spell put up by the other person in the booth. You didn't notice, but don't worry, I made the perception rolls for you just to be fair.

"The shocked occupants of the bar attempt to dive for cover, but their efforts are in vain. The initial blast tears through the table as if it had been made of tissue paper, igniting everything in its wake—including the bottles of alcohol kept on the wall behind the tiny establishment’s bar counter. Everyone inside the watering hole instantly perishes as the building erupts in a terrible inferno that sends burning debris hurtling through the air in all directions. Though the firefighters bravely attempt to save as many lives as they can, several dozen people are killed in the blaze, including a promising young medical student who is volunteering at the soup kitchen down the street, as well as a pair of newlyweds who are driving through the neighborhood on the way to Portland (where they had planned to spend their honeymoon). The next day, the kidnapped child the runners were being hired to rescue dies an agonizing death during the ritual sacrifice performed by her evil cannibal Neo-Nazi terrorist cultist blood mage captors, enabling Cthulhu to rise from his death-like slumber in the sunken city of R’lyeh. All of metahumanity is paralyzed by terror and insanity as the Great Old One revels in his horrific destruction of all life on earth."

The moral of this story? When petty squabbles get out of hand, nobody wins.

I thought the moral was "when you start a flame war, Cthulu wins." So get out there and start flaming!

i try to do NPC voices when i GM tabletop, to add atmosphere. unfortunately, my talents in voice acting are limited to about three or four different voices, if you take a very liberal view of the word "different".

Same here. And thanks to my childhood, if my players ever hear a hispanic voice they automatically assume it's a gang member, because all my gang members get hispanic voices before I even realize I'm doing it.

I tend to add in random details when I'm introducing a place, but when the shit goes down, I tend to gloss over details and get distracted by the battle.