Help - Search - Members - Calendar
Full Version: Deathgame 2062
Dumpshock Forums > Discussion > Shadowrun
Mercer
Deathgame 2062 was my nod to The Running Man (book and movie), Smash TV, Unreal Tourament, paintball, and reality shows. Here's the run down:
    I think it would be neat if the pc’s were hired/tricked/forced to participate in a South American death tourney for maybe 50,000 nuyen a game, and say a five game commitment. Have them assigned court-appointed theatrical agents (10% Industry Standard, 20% for convicted killers, and so on). They can be sold by those who do not wish to be bothered with them any longer (waste of a tax-payers dollar) to an Aztlan based entertainment company who wants to make them a star (even if it has to be a posthumous title).

    In fact, this could be The Village that I have been thinking about adapting to Shadowrun for oh so long. The pc’s agree to join the company (or, in the case of some, are sold to the company), and then are transported to the village without knowing where they are going. They do not even know what continent they are on (though they can probably rule out Antarctica).

    The Village lies in an equatorial region, maybe Africa or South America or the Pacific or New Zealand or Caribbean League. Literally, “Anywhere in the World.� Maybe Malaysia. A tourist resort in an extremely isolated area, this luxury retreat is fifty years old, and fallen to neglect. The company took it over and refurbished it on a limited budget, but it is kept in good repair. The company then buys prisoners, soldiers, mercs and whoever else wants to die for profit and lets them live there in the Casa de Muerte (as it is known to a few of the guards, if we stick with the Azt connection). It is on a small island, which the company claims is the mainland because they want people to try to escape.

    They are fed and live in relative comfort. The food isn’t bad, the rooms are dry and air-conditioned, the water clean. There is a full gym, athletic court, a couple of pools, plus the beach and local wildlife trails (on the peninsula side of the isle). A golf course is maintained (9-hole, mostly par four). All basic needs are provided for. (Golf is considered a basic need.) Escorts are brought in from any of several mainlands, usually for a week. Escort services are pretty basic, players are allowed to pay out of pocket for higher (or for that matter, lower) class escorts and services. Nothing is forbidden. The resort also maintains a hospital with cybersurgery capabilities. Any grade cyberware can be purchased at a discount, or installed on credit (an incentive/blackmail tactic to keep players in the game). It makes more efficient players.

    The Contract. 50,000 Nuyen per match, with a commitment of three matches minimum. Or Five. Three seems too few, five seems too many. Four is just wrong. We’ll have to see how it goes. Escape attempts count (they are televised).

    After the first few, survivors can be engaged for 100,000 per match. The company will try to get a three game commitment, but won’t press for it. This is when the company actively tries to kill the players. Ringers, faulty gear, ambushes, set-ups, what have you, the company likes to kill players. It sends half the balance of a players account to his listed beneficiary, if there is one. Otherwise, they just keep it all.

    Players who survive these three matches are plucky, and pluck is worth bucks. A player that’s gone eight in The Show can just about name his or her price, especially since the company doesn’t have to pay them if they die and can keep half the player’s previous balance.

    Money rules as follows: A player cannot transfer more than 10% of his payment off-island. 10% of payment is automatically removed as an agent fee (20% for prisoners and slaves). A prisoner also pays 50% automatically to the penal system that sold him (paying your debt to society). Basic living expenses are comp’ed. Luxury expenses—alcohol, drugs, chips, sex, a jeep for the day is all extra, though quite reasonable really. Also, advertising rights of prisoners are the sole property of the company.

    As a side note, prisoners can never leave the game. They play till they die. The company realizes this would negatively impact morale, so they don’t tell people. Why bring up bad news?

    Matches vary in nature, but most follow and Unreal Tournament mold (Assault, capture the flag, death match, etc.) Rogue Spear may be added here, with terrorist hunt and hostage rescue missions.

    Players are provided with their choice of weapons and armor, within reason. This means basic items. Other items can be purchased out of a fighter’s prize purse (special weapons, ammo, armors, etc), as negotiated by the contestant or his agent.

    The geography of the resort and island is as follows. The resort is located on the beach. There is a resort community the size of a small city, about half of which is reclaimed by the jungle and the other half maintained as a pseudo-city—this is where many of the matches take place—a short distance away. The city is off-limits, except during matches. Players are given a short tour before they are asked to lay down their lives. A rusted tanker is anchored a few hundred meters offshore, for matches that involve a tanker. The resort maintains a heliport for supplies and such, and a mock airport for matches involving an airport. A mostly hollowed out, but well groomed, 727 or what have you, resides there. There may also be an offshore platform a few kilometers away for matches than involve an offshore platform.

    The majority of the players are fodder. They are hired, get killed and are never paid, though the corporation does pay itself half the balance anyway. The company makes its money by viding the matches and selling the product on the open (black) market. Pay-Per-View and whatnot. Also, they have a new feature allowing people the simsense the match. I’m told it’s very popular. Illicit monies (tax- and tariff-free!) are in the tens of millions per market. Open markets exist in Aztlan, Asia, most of Europe, Australia, some tribal lands, and black markets exist everywhere else. Matches are shown live and people bet on them heavily. It’s the live sport thing that really rakes in the dough, and second hand matches circulate heavily as a sick, side-interest sort of thing. In places where matches are legal, the company owns the rights to advertise and such. Advertising deals for players (who aren’t prisoners) are brokered by the company (with a 20% agent fee), with the balance paid to the player in any account he wishes.

    Side note: A player who can elect to have a simsense recorder implanted at no cost to him or herself, with a bonus equal to the going rate of a match paid into their company account.

    Many corporations lend or give new equipment to the company to be used in their death matches. Most megas shy away from this because it is bad publicity (Azt may be the exception, Renraku too), but their military subsids go all for it. Equipment is usually ready for the market, and the corps pay to have their guns shown in a preferred light. Weapons, armor, cyberware and such all have endorsement deals. As do many sport drinks and athletic wear.

    Matches are played weekly, give or take. Big matches maybe once a month. They are played at all times, day or night and rain or shine. Atmospheric conditions are good for ratings. Matches are beamed live via satellite to all markets who pay for them, and are scrambled otherwise. Matrix security is very tight.

    Island security: Is tight. The geo-synchronous satellite that beams the matches to the world also acts as a spy satellite for the island, providing a high-res heat sensitive picture of the entire surface of the island. The satellite could read a license plate if for some reason the ass end of a car pointed skyward. The island is light jungle, it doesn’t have enough old growth to have a canopy that could blank the picture, but some hiding is possible.

    Resort security is rigged and tight. There are cameras everywhere. Player hijinx is vided, incase it turns out to be interesting. Big matches often have pre-game shows that show players in drunker bar fights, in the gym, abusing hookers or what have you. All of this is good 3v. (In a society who's idoltry is violence, the only glory is the glory of war.)

    The company maintains a small private army. Players are issued weapons at the pre-game and all gear is reclaimed afterwards. Normal clothes are about the only gear the players have in their daily lives. Books, 3v, chips, and other such entertainment are comped or bought at the going rate. Smoking is allowed, No-Smoking areas exist but are rarely observed. The mood of the resort is sort of a prison/mental hospital/war zone. Add “zoo� to that list as well.

    Players are monitored as much as possible at all times. Inside the resort this includes visual and auditory. Outside the resort, players are mainly just tracked by the satellite, and not listened in on with technology. Watchers also patrol and monitor people. The Company isn’t that concerned with escape attempts as most are there voluntarily and no communication with the outside world is allowed, except for independent theatrical agents, which I will discuss later.

    Astral security is likewise tight. The Company maintains a strong support of magical types, and many astral sec measures such as Spirits, Elementals, Dual-Natures and Watchers. A watcher for every person is wasteful, but sec risks are closely monitored. Mainly, a perimeter is maintained and anyone leaving the island is pounced on. It’s more difficult to monitor underwater, but tech takes over with sonic nets and such. Bioforms can’t get very far underwater.

    Internal security operates on a hands-off policy. The Company tries to get away from the truth of the imprisonment. Players are not allowed to kill or seriously injure one another, nothing that would affect playing ability. Punishment in this area can be pretty strict (the company must protect its investment).

    Players: Vary. Many, as said, are fodder. They come and go with the wind. Nameless, faceless dead men.

    Some are pretty good. Combat mages, deadly phys ads, overwired razor boyz, stone psychotics, drug and chip jazzers, vampires, banshees, shape shifters, etc etc. They run the gamut from incompetent to god-like, and are housed and pampered and paid accordingly. Paranormal, quasi-normal, abby normal: this place gets them all.

So that's it in the broad strokes. Details to follow.
Mercer
Non-Player Characters, notes.
Deathgame 2062


There are two main types of NPC’s in this game, split roughly into groups of combatants and noncombatants. Combatants include all the game players. Noncombatants include all the corporate people, all the admin people, all the hookers and whores and drug dealers. It is its own, insular world.

All the combatants live at the Hotel California. It’s the hotel/mental hospital/prison/zoo. A former luxury resort for jaded Asian businessmen, its a big old gilded cage for lambs being led to the slaughter and for the wolves and lions that will be slaughtering them. Here, all combatants are at truce/cease fire. No combat is allowed in the Hotel California, but obviously some will take place. Minor slip ups are ignored, but punishment is swift for anyone who becomes a liability or threatens the profit margin. Combatants are usually split up into groups by skill level, with the majority of them being Chaff. A small number are considered Minor Players, and a very small percentage (those with more than 8 games) are considered Major Players.

Chaff: Gangers, prisoners, psychopaths, desperate people, etc. They tend to fill the foot soldier role. They have no cyber or magic (or very little), and tend to get shafted on the weapon selection and armor. They get the Hostage job on a lot of missions. Their main job is to die loudly and graphically on 3v. People are of this rank when they can’t help it.

Minor Players: These guys conform to the stats for beginning runners. They are usually split up between young’uns trying to prove themselves, make some quick money or establish some trigger time and gun cred; and people coerced into Deathgame. These guys (and girls) tend to have light cyber and magic, nothing fancy but nothing to sneeze at either. Book archetypes and standard character creation rules apply.

Major Players: Book archetypes and standard character creation rules go right out the window. These are the badasses. The majority of this ranking are people who have gone eight in The Show and are either getting ready to retire, are going for the long green, happen to fit in here, or cannot leave and must play until they die. Many of them are celebrities. Most major players tend to live off-island and only play in championship games and other special events. Major Players that reside on island tend to be forced to, though there may be one or two who just like the institution. It’s a serious game, and it pays to stick around your competition. Unless we go with the Village example, in which case, everybody lives on island. Everybody fights, nobody quits. There are some Major Players who haven’t gone 8 in the Show, who are new but show such promise that no one can deny their skill level.
Mercer
Deathgame 2062
The Actual Games (most stolen from Unreal Tournament, and other games)


Team Deathmatch:
Very simple and one of the most popular. Sort of like paintball, but with real guns. Anywhere from 2 to 5 teams, of as many as three to seven players, occupy a strictly defined area of play, and play until all but at least member of a single team is eliminated, or until a team has the requisite number of kills.

Deathmatch/Last Man Standing:
As above, without the teams. Every man for himself. Allegiances are not forbidden, but it is last man standing.

Capture the Flag:
As the name implies, typically two teams face off in a battleground. Each team’s target is the other team’s flag. First team to have both flags in their Safe Zone wins, or it goes by score to a predetermined number, usually no more than three.

Assault:
Similar to Above. One team is designated as Aggressor, one as Defender. Aggressors are trying to complete a very specific mission goal, or series of goals which must be completed in a predetermined order. Defenders try to stop them. Matches are scored and timed. These games range from very simple assaults to complicated mission objectives. Some may be based whole or in part on actual battles, conflicts or movie scenes.

Hostage Rescue:
A variation of assault in which the Defenders have hostages. Hostages are usually rigged with explosives, or under drone guard. The Aggressors mission is to save them. The defenders job is to stop them. Etc.

Safari:
A Team is assigned to hunt a specific paranormal creature within the electronic confines of the game zone. This may be one especially dangerous creature or many creatures, it may be a ghoul town or a wyrd mantis infestation, bug spirits, toxics, or anything else.

Survival:
A competitive game in which two or more teams compete for limited resources in a Survivor type atmosphere.

Most Dangerous Game:
A large group of well-equipped hunters go after a small group of unarmed or otherwise disadvantaged prey. Typically a lot of low qualities, led by a prime player, will hunt a small group of talented individuals who have a certain game area to hide in. The event is usually timed with score kept by how long the prey evades or how many hunters the prey takes out before they are brought down.

A Day At The Races:
Hell, and we’ve just been talking about Man on Man Games. Riggers get to play too.
First, you got DeathTrack, a straight-up car race for any fast, mobile vehicle run on a series of reasonably conventional tracks. Cars would be limited to perhaps, two hardpoints and four softpoints, or one and six, or eight soft. Speed kills. You have to finish the race to win… course it’s easier when all the other racers are dead.
Then, there’s The Cannonball Run, when a series of vehicles have an Enduro-Race that can last several days. The Cannonball is a relatively clean run race, Car Wars is the modern warfare equivalent of the Road Trip. PC’s can be racers or Ambushers. That’s a mainland thing, trackless desert and sat coverage.
Carmageddon is a crowd fave, with a variety of combat vehicles turned loose in a refugee camp or slum. Points for pedestrians killed. Some Carmegeddon races have laps and a finish line, though almost everyone ignores it. You get paid more for last man standing. PC’s can be drivers, or Guerrilla Units trying to stop the vehicles. GU’s are given some light weaponry, nothing that can take a vehicle easy, and are turned loose in the Race Zone. Each GU wears a beacon that pinpoints his location within 10-30 Meters, making him a runner, not a camper. The vehicles have hardpoints designed to take out other vehicles, that can flat annihilate individuals. Combat Biker matches and conventional Demolition Derbies are also run.

And, of course, Any of the Above. PC’s might have to do a hostage rescue of a prisoner in a vehicle during a Carmageddon race. Or be hunted during one. Ratings is all that matters, and blood is worth points.
Mercer
Final Thoughts, at the Beginning

Much like Victor/Victoria is a movie about a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, Deathgame 2062 would be a game for players playing characters who were playing a game (albeit one with mortal consequences). But just because the games the characters play are based on video games and movies (and on rpgs themselves, no reason Deathgame 2062 can't have a "Dungeon Delver Holiday Special"), I don't think that means that the players can't roleplay those characters as much as in any other game or scenario. On the one hand, the player can play the game like he would Unreal Tournament or Car Wars; he can play to win. (A lot of people play rpg's this way anyway, I think we all do it from time to time.) On the other, you can play it like the character is a real person who is thrust into a live action video game with life-and-death consequences. It doesn't have to be all one or the other.

Games are about a lot of things like immersion and challenge and story. Deathgame 2062 just puts the "game" part up front and makes no bones about it. At least, I think that's how it would have to be if it was going to work for more than a few sessions.
martindv
See, this is why I wish the Desert Wars weren't so tightly controlled. Maybe the version in Xinjiang (which has its own problems, beginning with the probably battlefield being the middle of nowhere) could allow for some more "flexibility."

Sir_Psycho
It seems to push what's acceptable in Shadowrun just a little. The majority of the desert wars are fought with gel rounds, and it's tradition for the grand final to be live fire. But this is straight out mass snuff, hundreds of people dying every game, chunks flying everywhere, people taken apart by high caliber weapons, people impaled, garrotted, ran over, thrown from tall buildings, exploded, imploded and burned alive.

While snuff certainly exists in the sixties, not on such a scale does it seem possible that it would get enough ratings to pay hundreds of people 50'000 per match. That would take the fast dwindling resources of a great dragon.

I don't mean to piss on your parade, of course. You can just run it if you want, it'd be great for an easy avenue into large scale combats with no worry about consequences (other than your own death, of course).

Personally, given that I'm a very stealth-oriented shadowrunner (Adepts with Stealth 10, please) if a character that I GM gets caught, I'd probably put them in a smaller scale version of this, have him completely stripped of all gear and have to escape from a dark and gloomy locale (mental asylum, abandoned prison, aztec temple, the new york state library) while trying not to be killed by whatever psychopaths the labyrinth is stocked with. More man-hunt than desert wars.
Mercer
Well, there'd only be a handful of people making 50k per match, most of the non-combatants and chaff are going to be paid scale. But all that's really important is that the Deathgame is possible in the context of the system, we don't have to figure out exactly what profits it generates per market. Its perfectly scaleable for almost any game; it could be 10 guys on an island (like the movie that came out last summer with Stone Cold, that I think was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down), or it could be 100 guys fighting a small scale war.

It probably does push what's acceptable for Shadowrun, but its designed to be over the top. (Not like the movie Over the Top, since I'm not going to write up rules for arm wrestling, but like the expression "over the top".) What I'd really like to do, and what kept me from putting this game together seriously, was I'd like run it as a satirical skewering of reality television. Somewhere between Series 7 and Network.

The mechanical challenges of the "runs" would be the easy part; they'd be designed like any other run. The stumbling part for me was how to make the downtime different, to give the pcs that claustrophobic feeling that they were living their whole lives under glass, for the entertainment of jaded strangers.
Kagetenshi
QUOTE (Sir_Psycho)
While snuff certainly exists in the sixties, not on such a scale does it seem possible that it would get enough ratings to pay hundreds of people 50'000 per match. That would take the fast dwindling resources of a great dragon.

IIRC, Shadowbeat had Aztlaner bloodsports as being quite popular even in the UCAS, despite being banned there. If you remove the banning, which IMO is wholly appropriate for the 2050s, this sort of thing becomes much more reasonable.

~J
martindv
It was banned unless you had your own satellite dish, in which case anything you received and watched was nice and legal.

And you thought there were some bad sports bars now.
Mercer
The Deathgame notes are a little different from my usual game notes in that I wrote just for me. If I'd gotten to the point of presenting the concept to my focus group (I mean, gaming group), I'd have rewritten it. This was pretty much banged out in two or three stream-of-consciousness asides, mainly because I wanted to get something down on paper, so to speak, before I got lost in other things. So there are things that may have been rewritten for plausibility, there would have been npcs to put metahuman faces on the trauma, carnage and catastrophes.

The problem I had with it ultimately is I thought it had potential as an interesting set up, but there wasn't a lot of meat on the bones. Had the players treated it like a series of mechanical challenges ("How do we win today?"), the game would have been a longer, slower verision of the video games it was based on.
Fuchs
This does give me some ideas. While having PCs take part in such a game seems a bit too restricted for my current campaign, players infiltrating the island to rescue some participant - or his headware memory/knowledge - would fit rather nicely.

Another option would be some contract for a hardware corp, who wants to have some competition's gear fail spectacularly on live trid, or a bookiee wanting to make sure one dark horse does not make it/makes it.

The old "X marks the spot... what do you mean, it's in the middle of the game zone?" treasure hunt is yet another option to use this in the game.
Mercer
Seeings how the characters are going to be 3V and Simsense stars, this would be the sort of game where people would make characters specifically for it, a stand-alone mini-series. In fact, I'd be tempted to present it as an 8-10 session run covering one season of the Deathgame reality show (8 shows with a couple of two-parters).
ShadowDragon8685
I think the idea has merits.

Specifically: You have been thrown on this island where they promise you fantastic prizes for victory. But almost all of the Major Players are the criminals who survive a long time. You have no desire to join their ranks, playing until you're dead. So you need to get the hell off this island - and hey, maybe make some scratch on your way out.


You know, it occurs to me, the best way to facilitate a PC escape would be to introduce a brand-new Major Player: a Dragon who is forced to participate. (Being a Dragon automatically makes someone an MP.)

Their best way off involves breaking the Cardinal Rule: Never deal with Dragons. But when the Dragon in question is quite literally in the same boat as you... Well, it beats the alternative.

And you never know, Dragons are dangerous, but they can also be very grateful if you're directly responsible for their continued respiration and freedom. smile.gif
Ryu
There is the option of Biodrone testing runs. Place the runners in different environments, limit their equipment, use different biodrones.

I want to run this from a background of a high-tech augmentation testing facility. The players will get access to cyberware packages between combats, so the corp will get performance data on both sides.
nezumi
Hmm... Should the party ever get caught by Lone Star, I'm thinking the Star might recoup some losses by 'selling assets'. The party wouldn't get any money from it, but they'd get tons of karma and the chance to NOT lose all their nice gear (plus possible job opportunities in the future! Aztechnology is always looking for some new bloo... err... recruits.)
Mercer
At least part of the genesis for this game came out of one pc that ended up, after being played for at least a couple of years, in prison. (The crowning irony being that even though this was one of the most amoral characters in our group, he ended up serving a life sentence for domestic terrorism on a frame-up.) So pretty much all the references to prisoners in the in-game game are specific to that guy.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.
Dumpshock Forums © 2001-2012