See everyone seems to have varying degrees of ideals of what 'grit' is etc. This is why personally, I try to find not only groups that more or less like my own versions of such. But also when GMing, I try to find out what the PCs really -want-. What do they -expect- out of a specific setting? I'll also try to test the limits to the poitn where it's like 'Dude thats totally overdoing it' or 'Man.. thats boring'.

That way you can find a good middleground that keeps pretty much everyone happy. So I mean you might find a group that likes. Pain! Death! Adverstity! Mom's on drugs! Oh look something *shiny!* pain! Death! Pain! Pain! Aversity! Your friend bob has been murdered! *REVENGE!* *somethign Shiny!* You get laid! You now have STD! Crap you cant afford the cure! *do some evil deeds!* now you can! Sweet! Have more sex with a hooker to celebrate! God damn those STDs are back! FUCK!

Those STD are back ? I've only got 10 years to live ? That's fine with me, 10 years are enough.

I think Magic can be made gritty, hell we've got some pretty crazy magical threats like blood magic and insect spirits. Blood magic is scary in fairly obvious "ooh they do evil things" way. Insect Spirits are made scary if you don't operate them as "evil", but like insects; Odd (i mean fraggin' wierd), inhuman, blindly expansionist, they are scary in the same way an insect is when you look at them under a microscope, they're visually disgusting composites of insect invaders and brutally enslaved humans.

About the magically active being among us, like Cap Chaos said, some-one can road rage at you and throw a fireball at you. Magic puts powers in the hands of one in every 100 metahumans, it does not descriminate, it can be a tool in the hands of murderers, rapists, perverts (hello astral projection!), it doesn't just get bestowed upon the virtuous.

For the magically active, life isn't so glamorous either. Your abilitys WILL make a whole lot of people afraid of you, it's hard to find those who understand you, let alone come to terms with your own powers. What happens when you get a magic related trouncing by some local gang members, "freak" burnt onto your lawn, and when you get so mad you retaliate, you're expelled from your school because you just gave some of your classmates 2nd degree burns.

On the other hand, you are singled out for corporate service, even if you don't agree with what they do. You refuse? Oh hey, you just got fired from your job at the coffeehouse, and you don't know why. They keep on pestering you to join up. Your cat shows up dead. They show up at your door to ask you again. Your parents talk to you, they really need the money, they say it's your responsibility, and since everyone else is refusing to hire you, you sign up for the corps. Unethical Magical testing? Dangerous security/corp military work?

Every time you cast a spell, you feel drain. While it's easy to describe as 'you're tired', it hurts, even if it's just stun damage. Every time you want to use an ability, you feel pain, mucle aches, bruises, cracked skin, blood noses, sore joints and maybe worse. And let's not mention physical drain.

One mistake (IMO) I've noticed when GM's/Fiction writers describe Spirits is as too human. They speak, they help you out with favors, etc. Spirits aren't human, they don't make any sense, they can be summoned and bound through conjuring, but it doesn't make you their buddies. You have to live with that you're Awakened, and therefore more exposed to spirits, you could cut a shortcut through the local tip on your way to work and have the skin boiled off your bones. Not to mention any spirits you may come across through Astral travel.

Speaking of Astral Travel, shit, that's scary as it is. It's like going swimming, if you're smart, and a strong swimmer, you'll probably be fine, but go too far, or too deep, you might never make it back again. And some-one else described how crazy the metaplanes are.

And let's not forget the one phrase, that is the worst thing about being awakened:

"Geek the mage first!"

I knew a girl who's mother was on drugs, once. She had a real hard life. One of he mothers boyfriends raped her repeatedly, she started cutting herself to escape the pain but eventually had enough and ran away. So had no job skills and was living on the streets when a pimp found her and seduced her into a life of prostitution. She started taking drugs to numb the pain, first crack and then heroin. Then, she started getting sick. She got HIV from a John or a needle, she doesn't know which, and ended up with full blown aids. She tried to kill herself by hanging but the shower curtain rod broke under her weight and she ended up stuck in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down.

And then she was beamed up to the Enterprise-D, which had traveled back in time on a mission to rescue an endangered monkey so that it could tell his space-monkey cousins to not blow up Earth, due to a transporter error. Since she was going to die that night anyway they took her with them. 24th century medical technology was able to cure her aids, repair her spine, and detox her instantly. This was very fortuitous because as soon as she recovered she had to save the Enterprise from evil Romulans and she was the only one who could do because somehow everyone else became too stupid to think of the simplest and most obvious solution to their predicament.
The bridge crew was so grateful for her quick thinking that they immediately stripped off all of their clothes and she had a 5-way with Troi, Piccard, Riker, and Data.
Her name was Mary Sue

LOL hyzmarca.

Yeah. This is why I dont allways let runners have a way to 'fix' hardships. But you know ultimately most PC runners to one degree or another fall under that 'Mary Sue' umbrella somewhere.

Hmm this speak of spirits makes me want to introduce some time a character based on Gabriel from the movie Constantine. Where she/he/it? Goes abit psycho and decides to unleash hell on earth because 'humans only really shine through adversity!'. And then when, instead of killing her Constantine punches her in the face she congradulates him for 'choosing the higher path'.

Think about a spirit based off that concept?

Might be abit fun anyway. Or hell maybe not even a spirit but some rich crazy guy.

Hey nezumi... when you start the hardcore cybergame let me know I'm all in on that. I do tend to run towards simulating life and loss a little more in an SR. to each his own.

For magic ruining you life... I've just started a game on DS (Fade to Blood) where we're running the intro stories for HOW a group of people start running. The char I'm running is a priest who's awakened but doesn't know it. I can't go into too much detail, but it's already screwing with his worldview and how other people percieve him. I think there's hints of this type of thing in the fluff, but is really up to us to flesh out the 'cost' of magic. It's reality and mind altering stuff the affects can't be easiliy 'quantified' like essence loss and nuyen outlay of cyberware. Unless somebody with a whole lot more time and SR magic Guru-ness (Ancient History comes to mind) lays out some sort of system of "soul loss" to mana.. it's going to be more of a personal role play affect on a magical character.

parting shot, "Grit is: when Shit Happens, the runner rolls it, smokes it, and shoots the fucker shoveling it at him." or tries to struggle is where story happens

toxic guidance spirit?

Psycho, I feel like a good metaphor for what you're saying is to compare magic to a gun. Some bad people have guns. Sometimes when you have a gun, people more powerful than you make you do bad things with it. Sometimes people fear you because you have a gun, or they don't understand why you'd want to keep the gun. Maintaining the gun means you talk with some weird folks, gun nuts and military veterans, who just don't think like normal civilians.

But ultimately, my response would have to be, you have a gun! Sure, people might not like it if you show it to them, but you have a gun and you got it for free.

Cyberware would be like if you cut off your right hand to get a gun. You can't hide it (easily), and you made a clear sacrifice.

Sure, having magic might be tough at times, but it's a lot nicer than not having magic.

Erros - since I've never played in or run a game like that, I wouldn't know quite where to start! But I'll keep in mind that I"m not alone in wanting to see one.

A lot of my stories are bounty hunting types. That can be ghouls in any number of cities, juggernauts in the deep south, Wyverns harassing cattle ranches, or the special trip toe Amazonia to hunt some of the few bounties there. And of course there are toxics and bugs to hunt as well. That can be kind of depressing, espcially the ghouls and bugs: their nests being dreadful places.

I try to keep actual Shadowruns rather neutral, but that depends on how the characters act. Slaughtering a lot of guards gets a story on the news about it, complete with tearful family members and all that. Makes things hot for them for a while. I'll admit I've wiped out really bloodthirsty teams too, but then that's what happens if you go around killing everyone during a run. Too many people come gunning for you. Kill a bunch of gangers and you'd probably get a medal, but killing citizens, that's another matter.

I'll agree though that there is a strong dystopian view in the game. In many published adventures, the astral environment in most corporate areas is described as feeling dead or depressed, beaten down. This is especially true in the worker's areas and homes. It must really suck being a mage doing astral recon in places like that.

Does slaughtering ghouls get a tearful news story with their friends and family members?

~J

Well... The news runs weepy stories of other mass animal killings...

That's not true. People bitched and moaned quite a bit when it was discovered that the Third Reich had been killing Poles, Soviets, Jews, et al, but people aren't very cute at all.

~J

pffft... dragon for president yadda yadda...

I was going to come up with a parody for that, but it works too well with most of the lyrics unchanged to do anything with.

~J

Shapeshifters are animals, no one has any clue what exactly spirits are, and ghouls are people with magical AIDS. Ghouls need a fresh supply of rotting corpses and feral ghouls will kill to get them if left to their own devices, for that reason they are generally locked up in mental institutions or worse. Sentient ghouls, which the majority of people with the disease are, are perfectly capable of living in society.

Shapeshifters are animals that can turn into people, talk and even pretend to be a normal person. I think that makes them more than 'just another animal.'

They might be abit slow on the uptake but who wouldnt be from an 'undeducated' background? At worst you could consider them barbarians since they go by the law of the land rather than some arbitrary decision that says you shouldnt kill some one when they threaten you.

Reversed, my mistake.

However, bounties should have been repealed due to the fact that they inevitably lead to for-profit ghoul farming.

Edit:

The actual bounty topic was what I was referring to earlier, although I admit I had forgotten about SO 162 being repealed.

I feel sorry for ghouls, In some cases I would rather do standard wetwork rather than racking up ghoul kills for bounty sake.

They need badges that say "Hug me, I won't make you sick "

I'm just surprised this thread wasn't another Poll.

I never did understand why the developers took the this track with ghouls, trying to make them sort of the underdog. They aren't any different from vampires and Wendigo, both also caused by viruses. So far as I know there has never been a push to lift bounties on those two.

Now, maybe if the "sentient" ghouls were to live a certain and eat only bodies of people who left them to the ghouls, that would be one thing. But the feral kind aren't any different from vampires.

If I remember correctly from the canon, ghouls don't often breed but more often increse their numbers by infecting others. They probably took that out in SR4, but I know it was true in SR3 because a big deal was made of it in Bug City. That being the case, if there was a ghouls farm, it would probably be being run by ghouls to increase their numbers.

No, actually, it does change the fact that they're different species. That's where the line is drawn, that's the basic test of speciation. Exceptions are made if offspring can be produced but fertile offspring cannot, but ligers and tigons are typically fertile—hence, lions and tigers cannot be considered different species. The fact that they are labeled as such is, AFAIK, an artifact of the late discovery of their joint fertility.

~J

Fair enough.

Since I've never seen anything stating otherwise, under that premise I will have to believe that ghouls cannot reproduce with metahumans (or vampires, for that matter).

I'd say my SR stories tend towards depressing, we play other games for uplifting good fun times. I generally focus on the fact that the world is hosed and there isn't anything you can do about it. I let my players blow away as many NPCs as they want, the current group a little more then normal as I've got a few people that like to just rack up a body count to blow off steam from a week of work, but I do throw in that they just killed a person. Someone with a family, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and all that, and they just ended it in a heartbeat. I've got a few players that go well with it a few that are like "eh, I'm a sociopath, I don't care about killing people".

I do have to chime in on the 'grit' vs 'sob story' as I've got what I think are pretty good examples in my current group.

First the 'grit' character. He's a street shaman that follows gargoyle. He's a born and bred barrens punk. He survived because of his gang and has traded more then a few friends for his own life. He does what's needed to survive, though part of the gargoyle he does what he can to help his tribe. When we started the campaign he had a gang full of friends. Over time they've all gotten killed off. He used to run to maybe buy a better life for his childhood chums. Now he's not sure why he does it but he keeps doing it because he doesn't know what else to do. He's in the midst of recruiting new gang members to have a 'tribe' again even though he's just perpetuating the brutal cycle of kill or be killed. It's an especially interesting irony as the player is a teacher that deals pretty much daily with trying to keep kids out of gangs.

Then is what I think of as the middle of the road character, borderline over the top back story with bad shit happening but in the end the player nails my favorite part of shadworun being the part of trading part of your soul for what you think you wanted then realizing that you traded away what you actually wanted in life. Anyways the character is an ork street sam. He's an amerind raised by his grandmother because his mom was chip-head/prostitute. Most of his brothers and sisters stayed in seattle while he grew up in injun lands. He's a half breed (in that he's half white) which he faced discrimination for more so then being an ork. He joined the army after buying into the recruiters BS, after a few years realized he'd die of old age before accomplishing anything, goes AWOL back to Seattle, hooks up with a cousin of his who's got the right connections and bang he's a runner. The big thing that in my mind makes him gritty is how he is well aware that he's trading his soul for power with cyberware. At first he was cool with the trade but now that his nieces and nephews won't play with him anymore because he's scary, even though he's paying for their house, he wishes he could trade it all back. He can't and doesn't wine about it but it's there. He's also the one that tends to get drunk after runs so he can forget he just killed people, which always earns him style points in my book.

The true sob story that reminds me of way to many angst ridden World of Darkness games is the adept. He's a japanese elf who's father was an abusive alcholic, derived mainly from the discrimination he faces being an elf. One day his dad comes home and starts whupping him and he manifests his killing hands ability and kills his dad, his mom freaks out and attacks him to save her husband so he ends up killing her too. He then runs away and joins a street gang for awhile, he finds acceptance again only to have them all get killed in a gang war, after he personally annihilates the gang that killed his he gets caught by the cops. While Lone Star is processing him his old corporate SIN pops up and the come to collect him seeing as he's an adept and train him to be an uber elite death machine. Then his mentor/trainer sells him out to a rival corp in return for a promotion. He survives the ambush and sets his mentor/surogate father figure up for the fall and gets him killed. Oh the ambush killed his wife/love of his life who was an elite combat mage. He's listed as KIA by his corp masters so goes to the shadows as killing people with his hands is all he knows how to do.

Normally I would have trashed the backstory but the guy had typed up like 10 pages of it and this was his first try at shadowrun so I didn't have the heart to tell him to try again. Mostly he spends his time being a sociopath who can kill without remorse but likes to point out how his life has sucked more then everyone else's combined with occasionally pining over his lost love. He's the go to guy if they need a baby curb stomped but donates money to charity after I explained that while I will allow doing money for karma it's gotta be in game actions that would be considered good deeds.

On the upside he's started to grow beyond this character and has expressed interest in being a social adept. Which is good because this one got wasted in the arc run.