My first run was a solo op with a street ninja.
The Johnson contacted him directly and gave him an address to a Downtown temporary office-rental complex. My player was expecting one of those ciggarette smoking Johnsons from the pictures in SR3, but what he got was a pair of dweebs I referred to as Johnson and Johnson. This is the first time they'd ever been involved in Shadow-affairs and you could kind of tell. There was also an amusing little problem that came up in that we had to have a translator come in and translate between them because my street sam only spoke Spanish. After the deal, there was still some confusion on what should be done with the translator. Apparently Johnson & Johnson assumed that the street ninja would take care of it as part of the service, but amusingly enough, they got some kind of reply like "I don't kill people." and the Johnsons were like "Well, we're not going to do it." Except the word 'kill' was never used, of course, which led to all kinds of funny metaphors, especially when some stuff was mistranslated.

Anyway... the point is...

The Johnsons were given the name of this street ninja by his contact, a Fixer. Apparently they made a deal with her to smuggle in something from Hong Kong, but the Fixer's plans went south and now she's stuck in a Lone Star cell and the boat is being held up in port until inspectors arrive. Janet (the Fixer) assured them that the deal could still go through solid if they could get in touch with this guy she knows; that's all an unfortunate kink but she's got him as a backup plan. So my player was already to go for it, and then he brings up the subject of payment...

"What do you mean? The jobs already been paid for. We paid Janet a lot of money up front."
"Well no one paid me. This is a seperate job. I'm still waiting to hear your opening price."
"We have paid a substantial amount of money for this job already. We're are not paying more. You will have to discuss the matter of your fee with your employer."
"You're my employer."
"No, we are contacting you on behalf of Janet because our job still needs to be done... tonight. Or the arrangement between Janet and our client is forfeit."
"Well that's not my problem. I need to get paid."
"You can discuss the matter with Janet."
"But Janet's in a cell. We can't get ahold of her. Can you?"
"No."
"Then how do I arrange to get paid?"
"That's not our concern."
"Then I won't do the job."

At this point one Johnson turns to the other,
"That's unfortunate. We will have to inform our contacts in Hong Kong that miss Janet has stolen their money and forfeited the contract."
"Yes, and allowed their merchandise to be confiscated."
"Most unfortunate."
"They will not be pleased."


Eventually, the Street Ninja accepted the deal, but got them to offer some payment up front. The payment was a used cyberhand with built-in recoil compensation. I thought this would be awesome prize for a street sam since he didn't have one, but my player just got this disgusted look on his face, looked at his record sheet, and said "I don't have enough essence for that." Which sucks! I was going to use that to make use of his other contact, one of those funny medics that install illegal cyberwear in people. I had some ideas for that encounter, too. But he was like, "eh, maybe I can sell it." The idea that a cool piece of cyberwear made a lousy gift to a cybercombatant really sucks and has made me hate the essence rules.

Anyway...
The bottom line was that the street ninja accepted the deal, not knowing if he would get paid any additional money or not by Janet. That morning, port inspectors inspected the ship but found nothing. No one was killed on the run, although one of the Lone Star drones has turned up missing. A few days later, Janet was released from jail since they had no charges to press on her now. She paid a small sum of money (about 10,000) to the street ninja and helped fence the used hand. Also, as a seperate reward, I raised the player's Fixer contact Loyalty by 1, and I gave him a new contact "Johnson & Johnson" with Connection 3 and Loyalty 1. That has led to additional smuggling-related jobs.

I used that a few times as a Gm. If the characters needed a simple job, I'd have a contact call them up and ask for help with something fairly minor, like handling the gangers that have been shaking down their store. Of course sometimes that turned into something much bigger, like during the build up to Bug City, the team was asked to find a friend's child who had run off. They got to her before the UB could get her into the hive so the characters only faced some really wierd spirits and dudes with strange cyberware (or so they thought). They never did see the hive or the reality behind the situation, but it did get them to Chicago in time for the big show.

I've also had contacts call the PC for information. This usually involved the PC in something bigger than expected for whatever reason. One example was the mage character asked about some material from Amazonia and talismonger friend was about to try to refine, because the PC had spent time there. It was literally not goods and the retrieval crew came after the mage too clean up loose ends.

Things like this shouldn't be over done though or the players will get leery of taking calls from the contacts.

Yeah. That does kinda suck - in fact, it blows big chunks, but them's the breaks. If you want to upgrade a Shadowrunner's cyber, you need to give him enough Alpha, Beta, or Deltaware to replace the cyber he has that it frees up an essense hole for the new item.


Or you could institute a method for the gaining of additional Essense. Since this has both Cyberware reprecussions for sammies and Magical implications for Adepts/Magicians, nobody should mind overmuch. Sure, Initiation can raise your Magic, but if you can buy additional Essense, you can drop Karma on additional Magic, too. They would naturally stack.

Or, of course, they could use the essense surplus to install up to and including as much Essense's worth of cyber as they have Essense above six.

Quite often, actually. Again, I play NPCs as close to "real people" as I can. If somebody is on your contact list, can you really expect that you aren't on theirs?

New eyes with perfect vision plus new things like sharper vision, zoom lenses and the ability to see in the dark, that would be a real temptation.

Hell yes. My PCs generally live or die by their contacts especially the group I've got now that's gotten closer to the 'end game' where each of them have around 20ish contacts. They've had a few contacts call them up and ask to be extracted, a few cops contacts call them up and ask them for help working on a case which resulted in them getting a few shadowruns from lonestar and all kinds of similar stuff. Sometimes I have contacts call and give them a tip or something so they can go to a fixer and see if there's any related work. I like letting my PCs set their own shadowruns to a certain degree and I find contacts as a great way of doing that.

I also pretty regularly have contacts just call up and ask for intel on the shadow scene or if the PCs just have some knowledge that will help them, the same way the PCs do to the contacts. I think it makes for a much more dynamic situation if your lone star contact calls you up from time to time to see what you've heard and so on.

I much more rarely have contacts call for help with personal matters, barring family members. For the most part no matter how cordial the relationship gets contacts understand that the PCs do horrible evil things for money and the PCs understand that if they make life difficult for their contacts at best they'll stop answering the phone at worst they'll turn over everything they know about the PC. While the corp secretary might let the runners crash at her place provided there is no heat directly on their tails she'll be much more hesitant to call them up to help her move or find her lost cousin. Unless of course her cousin is rumored to be involved in the shadow scene. Which gives me a good idea for a run. Hmmm I'm going to go right some stuff up now.