I could see this as being really fun for them. In Shadowrun, business isn't just stamping papers; it's also stealing shit from other people and killing them. They say powerful people have enemies, and to tell the truth, enemies are what make games fun.

They don't have to be limited to desk jobs; those could be handwaved by the GM, having him devote all table time to assassination attempts and shadowruns. They could be their own best security assets!

Basically all of the reasons why Shadowrunners exist make this a bad idea.

~J

Expand, plz.

Well, the big one is deniability. It's a big enough problem to prompt corporations to hire people who aren't on the regular payroll with the direct loyalty that that can provide, without having the problems associated with the ones at the head being directly involved.

~J

You could go Aztechnology, make it a privately owned corporation, and make them the invisible powers that be. They make money off the top and pick out the important hires, but nobody ever sees them in person.

i prefer games that at least give a passing nod to realism. even if there were enough hours in the day to run a successful, powerful corporation and run around doing your own wetwork, any person who would spend time doing one when he could be doing the other would be... weird.

The Wrecking Crew had a legitimate front in order to help launder money and to give them a listing in the directory.

The Abstruse One

yeah, but that doesn't seem like what emo's talking about. i mean, starting a front company, a shell to provide the cloak of legitimacy to part of your operations? that's SOP, when you get to the high end (assuming you haven't done the smart thing and just gotten yourself hired by a company). emo seems more like he's talking about a corporation whose purpose is 'legitimate' business, rather than just being a way to hide your cash.

Players shouldn't start corporations. instead, they should start law firms, law firms with spunky single female lawyers and mentally deranged but unbeatable senior partners.

Ah, Emo is still with us. I feel reasured.

I don't think this idea is AWESOME enough.
What if the runners start their own cybermancy corporation, so they can run their own corporation, hire sexy female lawyers (who are actually loyal bug shamans), make hojillions of dollars selling delta grade cyber, and all have 12 essence worth of deltaware? The goal of the campaign is to destroy all of the megacorporations, rule the corporate court single-handed, and then eat a great dragon to celebrate.
Oh yeah, and they all have 6 cyberarms that fire railguns, and are grade-30 initiates, so they can use magic too.
We missed you Emo.

Needs more zOMGzorz.

~J

In every Shadowrun campaign that I've run, the players have created some sort of front for their operations. My favorite, was a Private Investigations/Security firm, which gave the characters a lot more credibility for certain types of runs, etc...

In my current campaign, the original players are playing and acting as that company via online role playing, etc... It's actually, pretty neat to see my old group interacting with the new one.

It could work. If the runners were all asian and ran a landscaping firm. Did you ever see American Ninja 1? The ninja sensei who trained Joe Armstrong to be a ninja worked as a mute gardener for a crime lord in the phillipines for years before flipping out by surprise to defeat the crime lord with his newly returned student.

American Ninja 1 also had bonus points for Vietnam Era Military Versus Ninjas fight scenes. The first time the ninjas assault the Army you see a soldier working the slide on his M16 because it had jammed and naturally while he's doing this he gets hit with a spear and dies.

Thank you for missing me, Moon-Hawk and others.

Here's how it'll happen. It'll all start with Brunei.

Present-day Brunei is a small oil-rich country run by the Sultan of Brunei, one of the richest men ever. SR Brunei's sultan will be really egotistical and insane. The runners will get approached with a contract to kill him by a man named Hans Brackhaus. The sultan's goals have gone far beyond any worldly power and he now exists solely to augment his ego. Part of this is the removal of any power in his country to rival his, in other words, Saeder-Krupp, which absorbed Shell corporation in 2025, taking over as his country's primary industrial power.

The runners will naturally assume S-K wants him out of the picture. Along the way, they'll be attacked by nagas and random spirits out of Brunei folklore that I'll pull out of my ass. But they'll never succeed, and intelligent players will realize they're making more effort to seem as if they don't want the players to succeed than they are to actually stop them.

The real plot is this: the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere wants in on Brunei's oil wealth and they've magically influenced the Sultan into creating tension with S-K. If they assassinate him themselves, it'll look bad to the people. But if they're able to blame it on someone else, someone convenient, then they can move in as Brunei's wonderful allies and take over.

The players will find reports of Mr. Brackhaus's death, which will boggle their minds, since he made a good deal for "Saeder-Krupp." He'll have scorch marks all over his corpse.

If the runners are completely mum about the whole thing, they'll engage them in tests of will and see just how well they can keep secrets. If they fail the interrogations, they'll be let go, and if they pass them, then the nagas will approach them with an offer to start a Brunei-based corporation with their investment capital.

Lofwyr will eventually figure all this out and start a huge-ass feud with the runners. I'm hoping the players are enterprising enough to extract all their researcher contacts and betray their corporate contacts, making this a perfect pirate corporation.

It'll end with a battle with a dragon under Lofwyr's command, and they'll be saved by Shen summoning a horror that forces the dragon into metahuman form, making him remotely stoppable.

I don't know I think the nagas are too much.

edit-

well one of the guys in are group "jaguar" started a gun shop"jaguar ind." and over time it grew and was absorbed by the corp "AVALON"we were working for so that corp didn't go out of business and that grew some more and such. it was really fun cause we all were on the board of directors at the end of the game. so thats more new yen then any of us had seen lol. anyway we had to deal with other people trying to steal his ideas and had to hunt down offshoot factions of the old corp and it was just fun. we would leave the "office's" and hop in our banshee and go do a mission cause Jaguar didn't trust anybody to do it but ourselfs lol

we did have a awsome name....MARKER LIGHT ind....

When you absolutely, positively need it smashed, shot, stabbed, beat, kicked, and shot some more..thats marker light....because we care....

it was great. we even sped up the time and played in 2080 or so and played our kids so it was funny being kicked out of corp life cause are parents thought we should have to earn it like they did lol

Endgame is too high powered. I believe that stories tend to fall apart as they approach epic levels if they started at low levels.

Really it depends on the theme of your campaign. You need to take in account your players motives and yours as a GM.

What do the characters hope to gain by starting a corporation? Does your group what to start one to launder money? If that is its sole purpose than it doesn't even need to be an actually physical thing. It could exist solely in the Matrix or it could be a post office box in Amazonia.

What kind of business would they like to start? If they are washing millions of nuyen through a business it should reflect that if it's a front. Washing a large amount of money through a corporation that owns several Laundromats is going to be suspicious. Washing them through a corporation that owns part of a minor league Urban Brawl team is another story.

Something else that your players might want to consider is actually investing in other already established corporations even a Mega or two. In a campaign I was a player in our group actually had a security firm but we also had an investment firm which had stocks in several corporations. It requires a little more work as a GM and your players may become more like bankers then brawlers, however it does add an interesting if somewhat ironic element. For example one run we did was to stop some eco-runners from sending data to the media which implicated the corp. in breaking several Sioux Nation environmental laws. We had serious money invested in said corp. and we didn't want to see the stock price tank.

This is the Sixth World...

Count NOTHING out. Hell, it could work. If they're successful enough, by the time Shadowrun 9th comes out and it's 2090, they could be a all be Leonized greats, in charge of an AAA Mega, taking their place among the Corporate Court as is their right.


Hell, it worked for FastJack!