I have a group of runners that are pretty high level, but I want them to feel like they're not so invincible... But I am unsure of what to throw at them. They're one Buffalo Totem Shaman, a troll heavy gunner, a dwarven demolitions expert, a human street samurai, a human polearm (scythe) user, and a guy who uses some strange martial arts. What's a good high-level thing I could throw them against... Another Shadowrunner team? A cyberzombie? Some Renraku Red Samurai? A Lone Star Police Squad? Help!

The simplest thing I can think that tends to get quite challenging is to send several (not one) powerful mages after them each of which has multiple elementals on call and who also for some reason have boosted initative. Seeing as they only have one Shaman it would probably hurt them a lot to be bombarded with the cheesiset spells, including Control Thoughts. Make the Polearm guy backstab the team's shaman, or something like that.

Hit them where it really will hurt .... brains, strategy and problem solving...

Have an adult dragon (masked as a person), who needs an artifact that is buried within some ancient catacombs deep within the city of france. Within an old church catacombs fill with wards, critters and a group of noble knights that are guarding a chamber that has a ward and cryptic magic lock, which requires stealing an old tome from a museum, or bank or collector's vault. Once they get the book ... the mage has to decipher the riddles of the book and open the lock. Inside the vault is a nosferatu monk, who keeps the records ... and is sustained by willing donations from the knighthood. He has a memory crystal which contains the knowledge of how an adult dragon evolves into a Greater dragon.

insert competing teams, vampire slayers, and security at will.

I do see some potentiality here... I think I'll start throwing some powerful mages at them, just because a lot of them have low willpower (haha, suckers).

I find the most effective thing to throw at runners is not one UBER mission that isn't remotely realistic, because it's so high-level it's completely ridiculous. When I want to mess with my players, I throw several overlapping easy runs at them. Whatch them freak out as they realise they don't have time to do everything they want to. They have to cut down on legwork and cut corners short, meaning they go in unprepared. That gets them out of their comfort zone and throws them into the unknown, and that's when they show if they are real pros or not. Can they improvise and still be good?

I had a really tough group that needed a challenge, so I took away a real important factor:time. I gave them a run in Denver while the CAS was taking over Aztlan sector. They had to go into the Azzie pyramid and extract a blood mage for ghostwalker (alive of course) before he got a chance to evac, which would be within 3 hours. All while there's a battle raging in the street of course. That one was intense.

For the encore, they were going to have to smuggle the bones into Aztlan and deliver them.

For a team that is strong I would go for a brain-fuck. Make them explore the (im)moral side of their characters.

Have them blow up a organised crime owned facillity were lots of SINless children are forced to work long shifts. Make sure its easy to blow it up from the sewers underneath.
If they don't do their legwork right they end up killing a lot of innocent children. If they decide to go inside to make sure all the kids are gone before they blow the building make sure some are in line-of-fire while encountering the facilities security and make sure some get shot so the runners have to decide to take care of the wounded kids or keep up with the schedule to make sure they're out before reinforcements arrive (criminal and cops).

Of course they will get extra karma for not hurting the kids and notoriety if they do.


hmm.... I might actually go ahead and write this one...

Once a GM literally put me and my fellow players' character on a boat called the "Kobayashi Maru". He wanted us to kill each other due to hallucinations but his plan failed since we didn't split up.

One of the most difficult run i ever encountered was at the same time the easiest.

We had this old lady our group really liked. She was the ''beggar's angel''. She had little money, but gave her house to squatters and fed the poors whenever she had the chance. A good lady. What we didn't know was the fact she was an ex-corpowoman who killed many people before and made a lot of ennemies.

Our job was quite simple, kill her. She was an easy prey. No defense, magical our otherwise. We spent like 3 hours discussing about whether we should accept the job or not. The pay was good, she deserved to be killed but at the same time, she was helping everyone around her. In addition, we knew that if we didn't take the job, another team would and the result would be the same...

In that siltation, the correct response is to take the money, kill the Johnson, and tell the old lady about it. But goad the Johnson into betraying you first so that your killing of him appears to be perfectly reasonable.

I tried to have the team do the demolition run but they just refused it.

Of course later it came on the news, because another team did take the job. They didn't check out the factory on the inside and just blew it up with a lot of explosives from underneath the building.

I managed to brainfuck them by flying them out-of-country to investigate some strange foreign ruins that their "employer" wanted cleared out (I'm being vague because I have to run to class in a second, otherwise I'd elaborate). Inside they found all sorts of nasty stuff. Genetic experiment materials, a completely trashed morgue, a pack of hellhounds (whew they freaked out on this one, but somehow they managed to take down all dozen of them with little trouble), and a few other paranormal critters and a few things I made up - like a rotting flesh zombie covered in rats. I even managed to throw in a few puzzles and traps along the way just to keep them on their toes. What screwed with their heads the most though was the rooms I left "empty". They were so paranoid about something happening in every room they entered I was lulling them back into a false sense of security and then I'd slam them with the next badguy. It was a priceless session.

The most fun session though was the one where they randomly decided they wanted to shoot up a small time local bar (it wasn't on my list of planned events, but I was like "sure, there is potential here"). Little did I know how insane and evil my runners were, as they started gunning people down in the club. The handful of other runners in the club started to return fire, and caused the team to finally retreat - just before the "authorities" arrived. This group is really fun; and we play 3rd edition.

Actually, now that I think about it, I will do the little thing where I have them blow up a building next to an orphanage... And see what they do about it. And if they don't bother to scope it out before attacking, I really will bite them in the ass with it.