My group is on the very last leg of Harlequin's Back. We're basically at the last big blow-out combat. If we survive (hehe) it will basically create a major turning point in the campaign, and I'm not sure what to do.

SPOILERS

During the adventure, our hardened, bitter characters had to 'soften' significantly, do things that they'd normally wouldn't have, because the stakes are so high. Arguing for the NPCs to do the 'right thing', finding a wellspring of goodness inside themselves... being completely altruistic, and trusting. Not compatible with the former 'ok we'll do wetwork if we have to' schtick.

So, if all goes well, we've not only traipsed around a dozen Metaplanes, and fought for the very existence of our planet, but we've also hung with an immortal elf (or two?). And. Saved. The. World.

So, after that, how the heck can you go back to the old life? It's not possible.

Does getting paid nuyen - NUYEN of all things - to aid the neurotic machinations of spiritually-stunted souls even matter in the slightest? No way. Such tiny, petty, small ambtions, such a banal form of darkness compared to the Horrors. Why play into that again? We know too much now.

All of the sudden, the regular Seattle Shadowrun world is very, very small. We're still 'small fry', as most 'runners always will be, but we've had a taste of something more. More meaning. More purpose. So, our 'Cybered Gun Nut / HTH Adept / Combat Mage' trio is going back to a world that will seem colorless, tasteless, empty. We have to find a path with heart. A place to fit. A job to do.

So, what next? Any ideas?

Note: our campaign world is still in 2056, so a bit before some of the biggies like Bug City, Dunkie's death, etc.

Move to Amazonia, and try to help nature reclaim the Rain Forest. Start watching the news, and become astral eco-terrorists -- cleaning up astral space whenever events hint that it's becoming corrupted.

Bug City breaks out Summer 2055, IIRC, so that's still a very valid option.
It's possible that the players might not even know that the insect spirits aren't Horrors.

~J

Right, 'cause it's a Natural and eco-friendly process going on down Amazonia way, what with the Locus and the blood magic and all.

Seems to me the usual Shadowrun type stuff would still be quite viable; just the sorts of jobs that one would accept would be a lot more specific. Work for organizations with nice goals and not much money. Help KSAF blow the whistle on some Standard Evil Corporate Plan To Steal The Souls Of Millions.

And once Bug City and the DunkieBomb happen, you've got PLENTY of goodness waiting to happen.

Hey, Mr Darke's still out there. Try to get hold of a copy of the first Threats book. Tracking him down is a logical follow up, and its not at all easy. And who says the gribblies in Harlequin's Back are his only minions? There's blood mages, blood spirits, wierd metaplanar entities... You name it, if its sick and twisted, Mr D's got his slimy be-suited fingers in there!

He can taunt the runners in dreams and generally toy with them till they decide to do something about it. And they keep that high level of power and involvement that will make a challenge after the rewards of the previous campaign.

Or you can retire them and start again. Its what we did, and those characters we now treat as NPCs, a la Blackjack and other legendary types.

In two campaigns I've been in, the characters essentially retire at the end of HB. We've found it hard to properly challenge characters, on a regular basis, who are in the 300+ Earned Karma, 15+ Karma Pool category. Since we don't start HB till the characters are very experienced, they reach this point by the end of HB. By this point in our campaigns our players often have "secondary" characters with 20 to 50 earned Karma who are getting to be just as much fun to run.

If you want to consider HB as a "retirement" run for your characters, you can boost the bonuses from successfully meeting the challenges of "The Bridge, Part Three" by letting them pick one bonus from a list such as:

* A magician can switch to one of the Totems met during the run.
* An adept can add a shamanic or hermetic side (2 magic points worth) as if they were an adept of the magician's way.
* A character can obtain an Edge that would be normally unbalancing to the game (e.g. Unarmed combat at -1 TN, or Spellcasting at -1 TN)
* An ally spirit of force X.
* An Elf can take on the genes for immortality (without the character knowing it -- but does become immune to pathogens, disease, knockout gas, old age, etc.).
* Knowledge to locate and recover a character previously thought to have died and been destroyed with no chance of survival -- they miraculously survived and have been living at location X, or stuck on the metaplanes.

An alternate ending to HB (someone posted this "evil GM" idea on these boards a while ago) is for the characters to discover in the final scene that this has been a metaplaner dream of Darke and not Harlequin. Darke wants the characters to get Thyla to the bridge so he can kill her -- thus preventing future attempts by H or anyone else to use her.

How my group handled this is as follows...

None of the PCs knew eachother before Harlequin's Back. We met *because* of the metaplanar quest, and because one of the PCs was a Seraphim, we basically all had to go underground to avoid being kidnapped and brainraped by CATCo; our ordinary lives had been shattered not only mentally but also in a very physical way - we Couldn't Go Home Any More.

In the process of trying to figure out a way to make money to survive, we decided that this whole 'doing illegal things for money' would be a good idea, especially if it meant we got to hit CATCo for sending crazy ASIST Black-Boxers after us. Shadowrunning was not something we did for the adrenaline rush or the money - we did it out of both necessity and the desire to send CATCo a message.

Likewise, we became aware - through HB and its' events - of the immortals, some of the more obvious draconic influence in the world, that Darke was still up and kicking about, etc. The connections between Cybermancy and horror-marking showed up, and we opted to keep shadowrunning. The reasons for contining to do so are threefold:

1) We had an ethos; *somebody* needed to do the dirty work of making sure horrible shit wasn't perpetrated on the world's populace
2) We were really, really good at it, and those kind of skills were in high demand
3) There are always going to be things that even though they are not horror-related are horrible and require fixing (Deus and the Arcology, the creation of 'apathy' toxic zones in corporate strongholds, kidnapping of the SINless to do medical experiments on them, etc.)

In the process, my character started a magical fashion line in order to make loads of cash - and while he was forced to hide again due to CATCo coming after him again, the year and a half he'd been doing it netted him about 5 million nuyen. With the interest and money he can make off of that in playing the Stock Market, that affords the group to fund themselves, and essentially shadowrun for *free*, to do the things nobody will pay them for. To do those things they identify as the 'right thing to do'. To go to the lengths others will not, because it's not profitable.

HB doesn't *have* to be the end - for us, it was the beginning. It's convenient to end there, but with a slight shift of focus, it can be a wonderful leaping-off point.

Some ideas for where runs could be generated after HB:

-Investigations into Cybermancy as a conduit 'around' the bridge. I.E. if people are constantly helping them build new bridges, Thaela's sacrifice doesn't mean anything unless you physically stop them.
-Spirit interaction. After HB, the PCs should have a fairly hefty rep among certain types of spirits or on the metaplanes. Perhaps the spirits have favors to ask?
-Combatting Aztechnology/fighting for the Yucatan rebels. Aztechnology's still practicing horror-tied magic, despite HB. And perhaps they must be stopped?
-Taking direct part in striking against the IEs... some PCs might feel that current society has been manipulated by the Immortals, and that they have to be stopped before they engineer another catastrophe. (Not our game's bent, but I could see it being so.)

Just a few ideas.

I'm doing Harlequin right now. After, it'll be stuff from mob war and super tuesday, then HB, and then they'll be the other group of runners in the Dragon Heart trilogy. They'll be the obvious choice because they'll already know what they're fighting for and against.

From there, we're going full out Cthulu-punk (Cthulu and The Horrors being one and the same).
No more "shadowruns". It's all about saving the world, again and again. Finding "secrets man was not meant to know" and giving them to trustworthy immortals for safe keeping or destroying them as the situation merits. Maybe the occasional character being driven nuts or becoming corruptted by to much time near the darkness.
Really, once you've been involved in a duel between immortals, and saved the world, while helping the UCAS VP's boyfriend who's now a drake, who wants to do another extraction?

Oh I don't know. We had one member of the group decide that ignorance truely was bliss and they didn't want to know about any more of that stuff. He could understand how the streets, the crime syndicates and corps worked, but the whole Horror's/higher powers thing completely freaked him out. Crawled back into his nice and - relatively - secure world where he knew how things worked and just got on with life. The rest were about an even split between going all save the world and those that still carried on running but were more picky of their jobs and did more work for the 'good guys'.

We retired after HB.

We had also only started HB when we were playing very experienced characters, so most of us were pretty near to retirement anyway.

Once you've done HB, regular shadowrunning seems kinda lame.

Of course there are some other things to consider-

Darke is probably still floating around somewhere. He's not going to go away.

The horrors themselves are not going to just pack up and go home. They're going to try again. Hence the whole Dragon Heart incident. Even after Dragon Heart, they're going to find a new plan to get to Earth early. They will try again.

Characters who have completed HB are "in the loop" on the horror thing. Being in the loop on that would lead all but the most twisted characters to be absolutely horrified at the concept (hence the name horror)- those characters are prettly likely to become anti-horror crusaders.

They're likely to actively seek signs of horror activities (and other horror allies on Earth) and jump in to suppress or kill anything they think might help the horrors get here early.

This is a likely focus for a post-HB campaign.

After Harlequinn's Back, most of the group retired, but several of us still play the characters. Really, there is a certain "let-down," not dramatically, just that you go from being the most important group of people on the planet, back to somebody who needs to worry how they're going to pay their lifestyle. Its not like Harlequinn invites you to his place for some brews and urban brawl afterwards.

My character's still not completely sure what happened, and never talks about it, but has set up a series of contacts to alert him to "astral threats." He's still looking and dealing with street level threats, but he doesn't have the resources to do something similar. Still, he's out there fighting the good fight, and beginning to make a name for himself. Remember, no one knows what happened except for Darke, Harlequinn, and the runners, and maybe some omniscient immortal elves and dragons, and no one really cares about the runners much anymore (except for Darke, and maybe Harlequinn if you want to have to keep dealing with an uber-good guy in your campaign).

I see a lot of talk on these boards about HB being "the end" for their characters. While I'll admit that you couldn't ask for a better send off for some well loved characters, I'm rather shocked that more people don't want to explore the possibilities this amazingly designed plot offers.

Just like someone mentioned earlier, HB can be the -beginning- of a campaign. We've been playing the same campaign for nearly 10 years and, while I won't bore you with the details, up until HB we pretty much rotated the same 12-15 characters amongst 5 people. The characters, incidently, were organized into a loose "Shadowrunners network", and aside from a violent blood feud with the Seattle Yakuza (The leader of the group is an ex-Yakuza assassin who brought great dishonor to Shotozumi-san by leaving his service), had not engaged in any truly "epic" gaming. (Well, some of the characters themselves had somewhat epic backgrounds, but that's another story)

That all changed with HB, about 6 years ago. It was the first campaign I personally ran (The guy playing the leader did most of the GMing), and I went absolutely nuts with it. I liberally changed a few things, tailoring the story to the group, but it mostly remained the same. My group had never encountered anything like it, and it was our first introduction (IC -and- OOC) to the Horrors outside of Earthdawn, and we absolutely LOVED it. The game became, very literally, the crux point of our entire gaming world.

By the end of HB our "Shadowrunners network" was basically being held personally responsible by Harly for the safety of the Bridge. About half the group, unable to cope with that kind of responsibility, left under a bad cloud. The remaining half resolved to live up to the Oath to their dying breath. It was probably the greatest moment of drama I have EVER GMed, and I was amazed at what it drew out of my players. This stuff was, in all honesty, as good as any movie or novel I've ever seen (Better than most of the SR novels, but that's another story).

A little sampling of what HB has wrought on our world:

The Collective - Nine feet tall, mutated, filled with hate, and powerful enough to spit in a Blood Mage's face, these 100 guys and girls are the survivors of Thayla's city. They were preserved by the Enemy as a sort of experiment, and resent not only their captors, whom they are forced to serve by their slavery to their own bloodlust, but metahumanity in general for having the freedom they do not. These guys are a nice way of keeping the gaming "epic level" without resorting to the really stupid dragon hunting common amongst other high powered games.

Stam - The "Shadowrunners network" has since grown into an organization known as Stam. Counting ~150 members from across the globe, with chapters in Seattle, Hong Kong, and London. Around 40 of these guys are statted and, between 10 players, we play all 40..... often. On the surface Stam is nothing more than what it claims to be, akin to a Shadowrunners Guild, allowing top talent to subcontract out. Deeper in it is led by the original members, those who took the Oath, and they are constantly scouring Stam's ranks for those who show, shall we say, an inclination to being able to handle exposure to the concept of the Scourge.

The Arthurian Metaphor - Way back in HB I laid the seeds of doubt in Zan, the ex-Yak who leads Stam. See, his best friend since childhood and his second in command is a mage named Rune (Played by me, natch). Zan's got a real King Arthur thing going, both in personality and appearance (Weird how he shares an appearance with Mr. Darke and Damien Knight, both of whom look like one of the more popular renditions of Arthur), and he was rather surprised when, in the Arthurian metaplane, the elderly Launcelot, who had betrayed the round table, turned out to be an aged Rune. Further on in the run, and the pictures of the Knights within the Green Knight's castle turned out to all be directly related to other Stam members. Since then the metaphor has been constantly reinforced, with constant paralells being drawn, and though Rune has yet to betray Zan he has expressed a great deal of pride.... not to mention discontent with the way Zan runs Stam....

I aplogize for overly detailing the setting this way, but I really want to reinforce how much potentialo HB has as a -new start- for your team. It's a wonderful way to have your players enter into the larger SR world as more than just pawns or passive observers, but as influencers of the world. NERPS does
-not- break down at high levels, despite what people might tell you, and we have had ENDLESS fun with the the various tiers of Stam's power, from the average runners with 1-6 kp, to the original team members (Those who are still alive) with "OH MY GOD" levels of power and 20+ karma pools (We use a slower karma pool rate after 10 and 20, incidently).

And, in all honesty, this isn't even a hundreth of the things that have taken place in our campaign thanks to HB. I picked 3 things at random, but thanks to HB every single character in Stam who knows of the Scourge, from 1 kp to 25 kp, is deep, interesting, and more involved in the world than the typical "runners". Harlequin's Back is, without a doubt, the best adventure ever published by FASA, and gives a GM the power to truly use every element of the SR universe for everything it is worth.

Immortals, dragons, Mr Darke (Who, apropo, is one of the biggest villains in our campaign).... what good are these elements if you can't use them as anything except "Ohhhhh, don't mess with these!". I'm not a power gamer, nor are any of my players (Or the other guy who GMs), but I do understand how power can be used and managed responsibly. Harlequin's Back, and high powered running in general, should not be seen as a swan's song for the team. It should be viewed as the open door to a whole new kind of game, the kind which can turn grizzled veterans of 30+ shadowruns into true heroes....

But, then again, I could be wrong.

don't forget about The Order of R who is a group bent on world domination wanting the speedy return of the scourge for their own purposes wether it being political, personal or whatever. (in our campaign)

Of course what the R actually is is for another day, but if Darke is still around and committed all that time in bring to scrouge through, don't you think he'd try some other hair brained skeem if the first one didn't work? OF COURSE HE WOULD!

Why the hell would Thayla make you take the oath in the first place if the scourge wasn't going to return until the next five million or so years? The Oath serves its purpose and it shouldn't be for flowery hallmark cards.

oh and btw... I love you Stam!

Our GM, the lovable nut, ended our chronicle with HB. What happened?

A member of our group took out his BTL, and went about his day as a corporate lawyer.

That's right. Months of adventure time were actually a coffee-break BTL. The rest of the group? Computer constructs.

End of chronicle

Ooh, now that's evil. That whole metaplot has so much sacrifice in it, it seems so terrible to play it off as something that mundane.

Now, another group I know tied the Arc situation to Harlequin's Back - I don't know the details but I believe some of the metaplanar stuff was actually ultraviolet host stuff; or else they had already finished HArlequin's Back and when the shutdown happened, Deus reused some of the HB stuff. Which makes one wonder, how does Deus know what goes on in the metaplanes? Two different flavors of alternate reality, seems a shame not to integrate them, really.

That group's metaplot is so far beyond my understanding of these things...

I think that's awesome.

bump

Edit-wrong HB topic