I don't think we've asked this one in awhile.

Favorite run you've ever GM'd or played in.

The Elven Fire module from 1st ed. Lots of detective work along with combat. My players needed to use their brains as well as their pistolas.

My group really liked their trip to Disneyland to extract Goofy.

Just 1? Well the group of guys I used to play with went through Harlequin multiple times but my favorite has to be Mercurial or Universal Brotherhood. The basic premise and idea of Mercurial is awesome, however running it by the book is not that great. If your GM is taking a lot of liberties with the adventure I would say Mercurial but if your running it by the book I have to go with Universal Brotherhood. Universal Brotherhood is just a slice of awesome no matter how you cut it.

The run where we were hired to help hunt down three renegade Aztechnology agents. One was a rigger, one a sammie and the third was a blood mage. Nothing like bribing a gang with one kilo of the drug of their choice based upon which group kills the most "badguys". Had all sorts of cool meta-plot stuff in it (our meta-plot, that is. Screw what the devgrp is doing...), my ganger got to punk down a funky servo suit with his combat axe, our occult investigator got "impregnated" by the big bad demon-type and ate a ganger's soul, our pistol adept got off a killing headshot despite being flashed, smoked, blinded, and shooting entirely by ear, we saw a blood mage light off a spell appropriately named "Snake and Nape" take out 35-45 of our hired mooks in one go, and my ganger got off a shot into that same bloodmage after being tossed through a wall only to somehow survive the 15m fall to the ground as the occult investigator busted a mana-burning stunbolt cap into that blood mage's punkass...

Good fucking times, all around. And that same GM is running the current game where a troll cast "Shitkick Train" after taking a .50BMG in the chest. We, after pulling our asses from the wreckage and getting our secret society contact on his merry way sans broken limbs, we got hired by The Star to find Mr. I Break Trains and also end up being paid by the Knight Errant bigwig to get some dirt on The Star bigwig after the mayor handed the case to The Star in public.

Whee!

So, there we were...

Our team had been framed for the abduction of the local Red Samurai commander's daughter. This elicited a response that could be expected. The Eurovan from Hell was leading the RS on a merry chase through seattle while our decker was using the sattelite uplink I had installed to try and find where where the daughter was being held. We find it, and I begin the frantic driving to get to the location. When we get near there, I tell the team to prepare to disembark...Samurai pulls a gun and tells me that I am crazy..samurai gets ejected, blows up, buys rest of team(Decker, Combat mage, sword physical adept) time to get out and get into the building, while I do my job: keep the sams busy until the team can rescue the daughter...


Now, favourite run I ever GMed? One Stage Before with the following team: Human Physical Adept with thermo vision enhancement and an Oyabun Friend For Life, Dwarf combat-shaman(Aesirist), and a Rigger who spent a ton of nuyen on..vehicles..including a float helicopter....It was my favourite because I had never run a premade Run before..and the thing was, with this group, hilarious..like the Ambush at the docks...(So...the cars pull out to block your way...um..wait..you arrived by helicopter...um..yeah...well..poor guys on the roof)

Favorite Run: As a GM. This is going to be a long one.

Back when my group played a lot (at least a couple of sessions a week, +10 hours a session, before marriage, kids, careers, etc) I hit upon the idea of the group taking on a lot of smaller jobs during a dry spell. Basically, the group had told their fixer they'd take any job that came up and I started giving them set-ups out of the old Sprawl Sites book. The group ended up taking three jobs that had various things that needed to be done over the course of a week, and which together would pay about what one of their normal runs would pay. In no particular order they were trying to find a kid, do a willing extraction on a corp exec at a party, and something else that I forget.

The willing extraction was the most straight forward job. They were supposed to impersonate waiters, infiltrate the party, and get the exec out before anyone knew what had happened. All they had to do was register with a particular temp company, using whatever fake IDs they wanted, and they would be assigned to the party. It was all worked out. What wasn't "worked out" was that the exec was planning on using the runners as a distraction-- security would be on to them and in the ensuing fracas, the exec and his bodyguard would quietly slip away. Further complicating matters was that the runners never registered with the temp company, because they were so busy racing all over town doing their other runs that it simply slipped their minds.

No one thought about it until they were getting into the van to go to the party and realized they didn't have their waiter uniforms... because they had never registered with the temp company. The looks on the players’ faces were priceless. But the group figured, to hell with it, they loaded up their guns and figured they'd do it the old fashioned way. Meanwhile, the Johnson for that run (the exec that was planning on double crossing them) figured they must have smelled the cross and bugged out.

The party was at a fancy hotel in downtown Seattle. The party hits it in a commando-style raid, blasting away with Stunballs, tasers, concussion grenades under the ice sculpture; basically taking the set up where they quietly spirit a target away and treating it like the landing at Normandy. They spot the exec and one of the sams runs at him screaming, "We're hear for you!"

The Johnson freaks, thinking these insane killers spotted his double cross and have shown up to exact street vengeance. So he and his bodyguard run like hell up the stairwell to the roof, where the helicopter he was planning on escaping in was waiting. The group rolls right over the security at the party and chases the Johnson, thinking I guess that they were helping him escape. They get to the roof and the Johnson is loaded into the helicopter while the bodyguard fires at them to keep them back, and now the runners think the bodyguard is betraying them and kidnapping the Johnson, so they open fire in return.

The bodyguard is wounded, but makes it into the chopper which begins to lift off. The group, all sams and mercs and one mage, don't really have anything that can drop the chopper. The dwarf spies some window cleaning gear, grabs the cables and runs for the chopper, which is starting to float out over the side of the building. The guy playing the bodyguard-- who was new to SR-- wasn't sure what to do, so he runs forward and uses his mono-whip to try to lash the rear prop off the helicopter. (At this point in the game there was so much confusion that everyone was just shouting actions, with no coherent plan at all.)

The monowhip gets wound up in the rear prop, which explodes. The helicopter goes into an uncontrolled spin 23 floors above Pine Street. The dwarf merc dives off the side of the building, holding the window-washing cables in one hand and grabbing the helicopter's wheel in the other and screams, "I got it!"

The NPC rigger botches his crash test, and the helicopter goes into the building across the street. (The Matrix had just come out, and I guess we were all hungry for a copter going into a building.) The dwarf merc lets go of the helicopter at the last second, and begins to plummet 23 stories. The copter explodes while the shaman races to the building edge and casts Levitate on the dwarf merc. (We calculated how far the dwarf had fallen over how many phases, and he was at the 3rd floor when the shaman snagged him.) The shaman then has to shunt the dwarf merc onto a balcony to avoid the flaming wreckage of the helicopter which then fell in the middle of Pine Street.

The group, suddenly realizing that not only did they not extract the exec, they also killed him and god knows how many other people, beat feet. Unable to get out of the hotel, the group holed up in a hotel room and managed to evade capture through the use of Physical Mask, Control Thoughts and some quick hacking by a decker contact.

I had been holding it together pretty well at this point. There had been a lot of general hilarity at how things had played out, but it wasn't until their fixer called them (a couple days later in the game) that I started to lose it. Through all of this the players had been thinking they had monumentally screwed the pooch, never suspecting that the Johnson had planned to screw them from the start (and this was from a group that always expected the Johnson to screw them). So their fixer calls them up and says essentially, "Jeez, I don't know how you guys figured out that guy was using you as patsies, but no one is ever going to try and double cross you again!"

When the players started to realize what had actually been going on throughout the entire running gunbattle, the table exploded with laughter. I thought I was going to pass out. It was one of those colossal screw ups that could never be planned, and turned out about a million times better than anything I had imagined going into it.

Run?

Queen Euphoria.

The whole Aliens meets Cthulhu thing. Taking experienced players who think they know the system aside and scaring the crap out of them. Letting them load up with all the groovy hardware their hard metal hearts desired and then pulling their arms and legs off.

Good times, good times...

Played in?

Hmmm, I remember really enjoying Total Eclipse. Not a very good scenario but it ends up with this combat against this massive spirit. It way well have been the first appearance of Toxic Spirits.

Anyway, the whole party is getting minced and I'm playing this relatively mediocre guy using the new Physical Adept rules from the Grimoire.

Killing Hands, Automatic Successes and Unarmed Combat out the wazoo. Long story short, totally one-shotted this thing, GM has it attack me, I counter and wham I do it something like a D+4. GM rolls a pile of dice, harrumphs and just keeps on rolling, it's the BBEG it can't be killed so easily, I think he gives it a Medium wound when it should have been completely Disrupted, and it swings for me again. This time it's got a +2 to all activity so the result is massively worse than the first time and the GM has no choice but to admit it's dead.

I had no intention of building a character that was good against Spirits, didn't have a clue how to build a PhysAd and had no idea the scenario had anything to do with Spirits. When we looked at the stats in the aftermath of this triumph it turned out this thing was nigh invulnerable, there were warnings in the scenario about how to cope if a TPK appeared imminent. It only had one tiny chink in it's armour. My PhysAd.

PhysAds were real popular for a while in that game....

Simple:

As player: Missing Blood from Universal Brotherhood (1st edition).

AS GM: Missing Blood from Universal Brotherhood (GM in 1st, 2nd and 4th edition), works perfectly alle the time.

Lars

We had fun with this one until we hit the brick wall of "not 14-year-olds with characters packing weapons going from AR w/ GL up". My ganger ran through the 4th floor after the ninja, of all people, flubbed their stealth check and shivved a few people. Propped open the elevator doors, slid down the cables all sneaky-like, tore open the top hatch and whupped a few peeps inside, got the SWAT shield ready, and when the doors opened up on the first floor...how's seven guards with APDS-loaded ARs grab ya?

Oh well, I dropped three of the guards before I had to bail due to reinforcements because the other characters pussed out after seeing mine get shot right through the shield a few times...

Mercer, that is hilarious! I love screwed up, funny runs like that!

'Nother game I played, one a player demanded, then couldn't show up for... And another player forgot his Character sheet, so got to play an NPC I have from my stories (Nas) and Keyune the Bio-Ninja Wannabe. They're still stuck in LA waiting for their trip back to Seattle after extracting Goofy from DisneyLand (I'm having Kane do the trip back for them, but his Blimp is a little shot up from a "Side Trip" he took to Aztlan.).

The job, protect a "Piece of Bling" going to an Orxploitation Rap Star. It gets there, and is a stock DeLorean. Nas, being one of the few people on Earth left that knows how to drive stick gets to drive the classic 1980s vehicle, while Keyune gets into the cleaned and reprocessed "Mickey Mouse Persuit Car", a Jaguar Sportscar with a concealed LMG.

Unfortunetly, they had to deal with a group of Boy Band members in a Wasp Helo and a trio of Entertainment Systems JetMans who were trying to board, and steal the DeLorean. Long story short, Keyune turned out to be a fair hand with an LMG (He just bought Gunnery and was lusting after HMGs), and took them all out. One of them stuck to the roof of the DeLorean by his Modular Cyberlegs with Magnetic Soles. After pulling into a "Jack-In-The-Box" for Stuffers (Both have Supathyroids) they detached the legs at the knees, and just drove the DeLorean to the Rap star, Masta Trog, as is.

Of course, everything got recorded (This is Shadowrunning in LA after all!), and Masta Trogg gave them VIP Back-Stage Passes to his concert that night.

...

Three days later, they finally sober up.

On Masta Troggs pimped out yacht.

Heading towards Aztlan Waters.

With something shiny coming at them.

It was "DJ Riggah" and his "Stunty Crew", a DwarfCore Hairband! And they were coming in hot and fast in Riggah's Gold-plated Hind-D.

Welcome to the Jungle of LA's Music Industry, Baby!

One from.... Shadows of the Underworld was it? The one during the presidental campaign and the players had to sit on a package for a couple of days before being called and told what to do with it.

So the PCs have the package and their sitting at the safehouse (an old firehouse). The ork decides to get drunk while one of the human physad decides to take a nap, in the nude, upstairs. Another of the street sams takes watch along with the mage.

At that point a local gang starts plinking the firehouse for some fun and a little profit. This gets everyone awake (and somewhat sober) and the 3 downstairs start firing back. Just to spice things up, I had a car drive through the middle of the firefight. At that point some friendly reinforcements (to the PCs) start taking down the gangers from the rooftops with some sniper fire. Now the funny thing was that the players were doing vision checks (NV/Therm) and they couldn't see anything taking down the gang members so they all assumed that a super-stealth ninja jumped off the speeding vehicle and started cutting down the gangers.

Then the 3 yakuza agents came in through the upstairs window...

I might continue this story later.

Queen Euphoria and Missing Blood from the published adventures.

From unpublished a drawn out cmapaign we were part way through when I realized we were caught up in 'call of cthulhu' but the only way out was to get to the far end

God... Favorite single run? That's hard to say...

The problem is, I don't often run "single runs". Even when I use modules, they're tied heavily into the backstory of the game and the characters.

For Bull, his whole damn campaign was really one long run. We played through all the bug modules, and we'd been playing with Chicago as our home town when Bug City was released, so it worked out incredibly perfect for the campaign (Especially since none of the core players knew anything about bug spirits, or really much of any SR backstory, and for the longest time our GM kept us "Blind" and asked us not to read the various sourcebooks until he ok'd them).

As a GM, I've had a few really good games that I've enjoyed. The closest to a "Single run" would be Elven Fire, but not quite the module. I have an adventure that takes place concurrent with the events of Elven Fire, where the Shadowrun team going through EF is fucking it up royally and sparks a major Gang War. In my game, the PCs are trying to find a runaway girl who's hooked up with an Ancient, and they end up in a 3-way battle between the Ancients, the Cutters, and the Steppenwolves (I love the Steppenwolves ). And there's a twist, of course, concerning the real identity of both Mr Johnson and the daughter.

Mecurial, Dragonhunt, and Missing Blood all go down as my favorite modules. Missing Blood is ok, but really, the UB stuff is more of a background and plot thing. The actual adventure itself is kinda weak.

I had fun with A Killing Glare once, almost. The PC's found out the mafia was involved and walked away from the entire adventure (They had a serious fear of pissing off the mafia again at that point).

Bull

The one where we did a stealth extraction by driving a car through the window of the restaurant.

A lot of my favorite runs as a player were the "Ti and Hiss" runs that we'd play when the whole group couldn't make it. My character, Ti (aka Eight Ball) was a Former Tribal Warrior/90k sammie, and my partner was Hiss, a phys ad played by my friend Mark. Since we were the two core players who always showed up, if the group couldn't make it, Ti and Hiss were our back up characters. Since they weren't a part of the campaign, we just did whatever we wanted. Neither of these characters were particularly powerful, and had to survive on ingenuity and meanness.

There was the time I shot out Mr. Johnson in the back of the head while he was driving because I found out there was a 200k bounty on him. There was the running gunbattle we got into in a penthouse suite where Hiss had a bomb strapped to his arm and was trying to stay in melee with the guy who had the detonator. But probably my favorite run was a module where the PC's were supposed to go to the tribal lands, kidnap some band or something, get double crossed and end up getting back at the Johnson somehow. I can't be more specific because in the opening meet, we decided that we didn't like the Johnsons, insulted him, and it somehow went to combat with us in a knock-down, drag out brawl with the Johnson (who may have been a shaman) and his shapeshifter bodyguard. I think we crawled out of there with something like 16 boxes of physical damage between us, and we only survived because I headshot the shapeshifter with a Ruger Superwarhawk loaded with EX rounds (this was before ExEx) and he blew his d6 Regen roll to not die. So basically we wrapped that module up in the opening encounter, saved the band and killed the main bad guy all without really knowing it.

In fact, every run we went on seemed to end with us having 16 boxes of damage between us. Part of it was the characters were just balls out crazy, part of it was the GM wasn't about to do anything to try to keep us alive.

(One of Ti's best moments was after dropping a guy and trying to drag him back to a safehouse for questioning, he got cornered by the guy's DocWagon rescue. So Ti shot the guy out pure meanness, got gunned down by the DocWagon crew, who were then on site to respond to Ti's DocWagon alert. Good times.)

@Jimson: Thanks, man. The totally unexpected stuff that crops up at the table is one of the things that has kept me playing all these years.

One of my favorite most memorable runs that I played in was when our team infiltrated a research facility that had been vacant for several years and tried to recover bits of data. The facility itself was awesome, built spanning an underground canyon/river in a huge cavern. There were suspended buildings and broken walkways between them, and several areas that were destroyed or inaccessible because of collapse. Found out that the research facility was investigating cyberware and HMHVV super essence levels to take vampires and other infected to levels of cyber rivaled only by cyberzombies without the cybermancy. Freaked all of us out when we found out that the some of the collapsed sections still housed tons of vampires and they could escape with their mist form (as documented in the logs). There was also some kind of huge creature which should have killed us all, but at the time I was playing my mystic adept wrong and the GM didn't know any better either, so I summoned an uber spirit which I shouldn't have been able to summon and it killed the beasty for us. Overall though, the undertones of the game and the levels of fear were so awesome that I'll never forget it.

I loved GMing a one-shot I created for my dormmates. We hated our campus security for really no reason, and hated our administration for really good reasons, so I recreated our town and the Campus 2070 style and created some warring factions on the political field and we were sent in to do some wetwork on the campus president (who kept using eminent domain to eat up parts of the historic town much like his grandfather, our president, was doing when we were at school). It was fun infiltrating the campus through utility tunnels we actually knew about and explored, and avoiding/killing several of the security staff, and shooting the president's descendant with a rocket launcher. One of the players loved explosives and got a ton of grenades but no thrown weapon skill and seriously injured himself in the first five minutes. It was a really fun total fluff run to take out our aggressions on the BS our school pulled.

My favorite involved a run where we were to be in Boston in a day's time. Unfortunately, we were quarentined in Seattle at the time. Our means of getting out? Call the local neighborhood Monkey Shaman and offer an opportunity to cause massive amounts of chaos. His method of doing so? Somehow ransacking Seattle via Godzilla.

Never leave a request open-ended when a group of Monkey Shamans are having their anual get-together.