A big part of any cyberpunk setting was, for me, the amount of sheer inhuman madness that lurked behind the eyes of every executive, every wageslave, every drugged up punk. The only difference between people in this kind of setting was how and when they indulged it.

Executives would hire prostitutes to lie down in front of them as their picture was taken and edited by computer to look like 50 kinds of macho, wageslaves would cry when the company anthem was played, and drugged up punks would plug looping microsofts into their brains as they called each other "cub" and "den mother."

How much does this insanity come out in your games?

It used to come out when people needed to be reminded that this was a world where dark and gritty meant getting hit on by Russian juice girls at the corner bar, and not making the place literally dark and shrouded in shadows. Most of the time it's just background noise that's taken for granted. It's one of the biggest problems I have with writing for a non-SR setting. Everything that I've taken for granted that my readers (mainly other players) know or understand isn't when the scope is beyond those individuals or that group.

A lot of this never made sense to me. SR canon used to present runners as practically drunkards. Many of the published missions had the characters being contacted by their fixers when they, the characters, were completely drunk. There were mentions of coffin hotels, bar room broom closets and getting home without knowing how they got there.

That just seemed really stupid. If you just pulled off a run, that's when you'd need to be extra alert. It would be so easy for corpsec, either from the corp you just hit or one with a grudge, to scoop up the character at the end of the evening while they are praying at the porcelin altar with no other team mates around.

Personally I like to keep my players a little paranoid, and continuously remind them that the streets are not a freindly place.

One player of mine lived in a hotel turned low class apartment complex just on the the right side of the line demarking where the barrens end and civilization begins. Obviously, this was not the nicest neighborhood. He usually narrowly avoided muggings and fights on his way to the parking lot, and tried his damndest to keep a low profile.

Him getting home from work was usally pretty eventful. One time he got home to find a Lone Star SWAT team using his bedroom window as a sniping position. Bastards raided his fridge too.

On another occaision, he had to argue for the better part of 5 minutes to get three squatters to move their crack smoking circle a few feet down the hall so he could get into his room.

My personal favority, and the coup'de'gras that finally got him to move into nicer digs, was coming home from a week long job in the CAS to find out that a few local hookers had jimmed the lock on his room and had been running a 24/7 brothel on his bed for most of the trip.

Theres alot of other ways to grind in the dystopia. One of my favorites (since most of my players are products of suburbia) is to make it crystal clear to them that Lone Star could give a rats ass about their rights, and subject them to routine harassment from the cops:
"Oh hey lookie here. Thats a nice shooting iron you've got there freind! You got a permit for it? No? Oh then that'll be two hundred for me to look the other way, 500 and you get to keep the gun."

Other fun ones to pull on them are getting pulled over for 'Driving while meta' or having a nice fair barfight turn into an excuse for the star to try out those fun new 'riot control' agents they are beta testing.

Well, last time my little group of runners saved the bunkmate of a contact from the organlegging head of forensics down in General Hospital, who appropriated useful organs from the SINless that came in for "shady treatment"...beat-up gangers, lowlife, etc. They liberated a few deep-frozen organs on their way out, including the ones missing from their target, and brought him to a streetdoc to get his organs patched back in.

Next game session, one of them will get a call by that streetdoc, telling him that the guy they brought in croaked shortly after the operation. Apparently the organlegging doc hid some neurotoxin bags in every organ he froze up, glued to the tissue with special protein that dissolves under physiological conditions. If you don't know about it, and wash them out of the transplants before using them, the reciever dies a quick, nasty death. And since the streetdoc was in a hurry to get the kidneys and liver back into the kid...

Just part of everyday life and death in the shadows.

Next run will most likely take place in a japanese walled community somewhere in Downtown Seattle. Built quickly, with grants from the city, no less...nobody knows that the thing is built over a quickly dug-out dump for radioactive waste. Nobody has wondered about the slightly above-average rate of sicknesses there either...and the decay in the park's foilage is steadily combated by the gardeners. Nobody wonders...except the Spirits there, who start to become toxic by the slow trickle of one waste tank with a broken seal.

ok. I can understand tear gas, but frag and HE?

sounds like a clue file.

This thread got the creative juices flowing, so heres some more suggestions:

Multi-culturalism gone awry-
Anyone who's read Neal Stephensons 'Snow Crash' should be right at home with this one. Put your players on a run through an 'enclave' like community which, despite being right in the middle of an ultra-modern city, still maintains customs from its primary ethnic group that may seem odd or backwards to the players.

Contrast of Class-
Make sure to mention to players that there are bums fighting over food scraps in the alley behind that super-opulent and exclusive nightclub they are attending. Show them the ugly side of the rich. Material for this is readily availible, I mean look at how many maids Beyonce has pelted with cell phones. It is important however, not to make the poor out to be 'noble savages'. Be sure to emphasize to players that the squatter they just threw a nuyen to would kill them for their shoes if he though he could get away with it. Emphasize the exploitive nature of the upper crust, but contrast it to the predatory desperation of the downtrodden.

Remind them that they are scary people-
Make sure that your players, particularly Street Sams, spook most average folks out. Emphasise mothers hushing their children and keeping them away from them. Mages have a special sort of creep-out factor players should be continuously reminded of. Fear, ignorance, and suspicion should be thrown at them whenever they overtly use magic.