So as I stated in my last post, I'm starting my first 4th edition campaign. I've never written a long runner campaign before our groups were more or less about individual missions than anything.
But for this new edition I'm trying to inter connect things more, while still maintaining the feel of being "independent constructor" feel of the character.
I'm planning on making this a 3 tiered campaign, the first tier being less professional missions and working their way up to the big leagues. I wanted to ask if these sound like interesting starting missions for a group. Please let me know what you think, I welcome any ideas on how to change things up.
Two of the missions, Stone of Orbis and Mr. Smith Comes to Seattle are modified missions I ran in my 3rd ed. group.

FIRST TIER MISSIONS
Mission #1: “Food Fight in The Laundry Mat�
The players find themselves At The Happy Suds 24 Laundry Mat. It is being knocked over by a group of gangers. The players will be helped by a Street Samurai Dwarf named Biggs. He will offer the team a job. The purpose of this, is to a) show the players mostly how combat works and show them that killing isn’t the only way to handle a situation.

Reward:
+2 Karma each for every captured and alive Ganger
+1 Karma each for every dead ganger
-1 Karma each for every dead individual

** If all gangers are dead, team gains 1 Notoriety

IN THE FUTURE:
If Lord Terror and/or Baron Fright live, they will return later with a larger more powerful gang of “Street Freakz�
If Lady Terror survives, she will appear later as a fully realized and power shaman of “The Raven Queen� (Dark King)

Mission #2: “Steal The Hypo Arm�
After a few weeks, Biggs contacts the players about a job. They will meet his boss, Douglas Wright, a male Orc. Wright wants them to accompany Biggs on a simple snatch and grab of a piece of high tech bioware and the data about it from an eVo lab. He will stress that the team should avoid killing as much as possible.

Reward:
10,000 nYn (Negotiable up to 12,000)
+3 Karma each for grabbing the biotech prototype
+2 Karma each for getting the data.
-1 Karma each for every dead security officer

Mission #3: “Sprawling with Mercury Starlight
The team is hired for a fluff job. Mercury Starlight is a pop princess who is breaking into acting and going to be starring in a new movie about shadowrunners. In an attempt to be “method�, Ms. Starlight wants to “shadow� the runners (heehee! puns are awesome!) The players are asked to take her out on a night on the town, and told by the Johnson to keep her VERY safe. But things can get out of hand.
Possible Events:
- Mercury wants to go on a Run, she even has a street contact who knows about a run. The job is to get into a warehouse and capture a special vector thrust engine. Unknown to The runners or Ms. Starlight, the warehouse is HEAVILY secured by military forces.
- Ms. Starlight gets herself on the wrong side of a Troll Biker group called, TWA (Trogs with Attitude).
- A stalker of Ms. Starlight tries to grab her, while out and about with the runners.
- A gang of Paparazzi get wind of Ms. Starlight’s position and try to get pictures of her on the street.

Rewards:
VARIES
6,000 nYn (Non-negotiable, 1/4 Up Front)
Tickets to Premier when it comes out.
+3 Karma each for Completion
+3 Karma for convincing Mercury to not go on the run.
+1 Karma for Completing the run, +8,000 for the team (non negotiable, Mercury will insist on being the “Face�
+3 In dealings with TWA peacefully.
+2 if they defeat TWA in combat
+3 If the team keeps Ms. Mercury from being captured
+2 if they recover her, without help.
+2 for successfully dodging the Paparazzi

In the Future:
If Ms. Starlight is harmed, The Johnson, who works for her record company, will send a trio of trolls to beat them up. But wont kill them. If Ms. Starlight is killed, all gloves are off!!
At the end, Ms. Starlight will fall in love with one member of the party, and offer them a position as her “personal bodyguard�.

Mission #4: “The Stone of Orbis�
The team is hired by Wright to meet with an eccentric Johnson. He wants the team to steal a stone from a private residence, the stone, which is magical, can only be lifted by someone who wants to, so the players will silently vote on how much they want to take the stone. If the team does any legworks they will learn the homeowner hired some “outside� people for security, Team Aesir.

Reward:
5,000 (Negotiable up to 10,000, depending on Tynan’s liking of the players; 1/3 Up Front)
+4 Karma each for getting the stone
+2 Karma for all players who Roleplay out the “wanting�
+2 Karma to each player who takes out a particular Aesir (teamwork)
-2 Karma each if the little girl or the mother is harmed

IN THE FUTURE:
If the little girl is harmed, the surviving family will put a contract (10,000) out on the team. Wright may give them up (Loyalty Check)
If any Aesir survive, they may try to come back and hunt down the players solo
If Odin is left alive he will come back during [Silke Mission #3 or 4] with a new team

Mission #5: “Mr. Smith Comes to Seattle�
The team is hired for what is thought to be a simple courier mission. They are to pick up Mr. Smith at the airport and deliver him to a safe house. They will be attacked by a group of strange ninjas… Vampire NINJAS!!!

Reward:
7,000 nYn (Negotiable up to 10,000 1/2 Up Front)
+5 Karma each for delivering Smith alive and unmolested
+2 Karma each for delivering at least Smith’s head.
+1 Karma each for every Ninja killed

IN THE FUTURE:
If any of the Ninjas are alive, they will report back to their master, and will appear again in [SILKE MISSION #5]

I like the ideas, but the Karma<->Nuyen payout is off. The Awakened characters will be advancing significantly faster than the mundanes.

I would suggest altering the payouts, &/or include usable salvage/loot, totaling to approx. 2 - 2.5 thousand per person per Karma earned.

Edit:
To clarify, by salvage, I mean anything obtained during the run that can be sold, most notably paydata. When I speak of loot, I mean equipment that the characters will find useful - this can be anything from new weapons & foci, ammunition, or even augmentation. If you use loot, however, I advise doing so sparingly - this is not The Game That Shall Not Be Named, & it is often considered bad form for runners to loot places they do runs in. Try to keep the players from developing a habit of grabbing everything they can -make realistic judgments on how much they can carry, and provide a point of notoriety or two of they do so excessively.

Initial comments:


Since you are awarding metagame tokens (i.e. karma) based on how the PCs resolve difficulties, make sure you have an above table discussion with your players about what genre rules will apply to karma awards.

It looks like your Y rewards are way too low. In general, the PCs should be getting around 5,000 Y, after paying for expendables and lifestyle, per two points of karma. This keeps some sort of balance between those who rely on karma (mages, adepts, technos) vs those who rely on money (hackers, sams, riggers).

For example, in the first mission, it looks like PCs will get something like 4-6 karma, so the Y reward should be something in the range of 10-15K Y after paying for anything they might need during the run. Remember also that the costs of lifestyles should be added to your Y rewards, but teh exact amount of adding depends on the speed of your game.

For example:
---------
I want runs to happen around once a month. I expect most characters to have a high lifestyle. I expect most runs to include expenses of roughly 3000Y per runner in things like transportation, expendable equipment, fake IDs, bribes, medical costs, etc. I expect to award around 6 karma per run.

So my payment calculations per runner would look something like (((6/2)*5000)) + 10,000 + 3,000) = 28,000 per run per runner.

There are 4 runners on my team, so when the fixer calls them up for a job, the whole fee for the job is going to be in the 100-125K range.

Note that if I expect the runners to only have middle lifestyles and expect runs to occur every two weeks, then my figures for pricing the job come out differently: ((6/2)*5000) + 2,500 + 3,000 = 20,500 per runner per job. So when the fixer calls up the team, each job is worth around 75-85K Y.

In mission 3 it looks like your players could get 14 karma each. That's pretty huge, but there isn't a lot of money there. If the group is all awakened or all not awakened the difference between money and karma isn't a significant issue. But the oodles of karma still might be.

Generally I find that PCs having excess money is a lot less of a problem than PCs with oodles of Karma. You can always just make it impossible for them to buy the cool gamebuster they want (and there are lots of game RP ways for them to spend money like a drunker runner), but it's harder to keep them from initiating after each game session if you give them oodles of karma. There just isn't anything else they can do with karma other than improve their characters. And magic 9 mages on mission 5, casting force 18 manaballs, will blow your game up.

Yeah, you need to pay more - the 2500 per karma AFTER expenses isn't a bad metric, and its why forcing people onto a single lifestyle is a good idea.

But really, just hand out sacks of cash if things get out of wack.

But really.. is this the power level your player wants?

I would give them way less Karma and keep the pay out right where it is.

Well for the karma and cash, it depends on how fast you want your players to advance. Personally i like to keep my player low on cash, having to make deals for weapons and spells instead of money. As for karma, i like to have around 5 karma per mission plus extra for exceptional players. For the money again, i like the players to have to work hard to get payed well, so they have to keep up with their fixers, ask them to look for certain jobs, look for certain jobs by themselves, and try to sell themselves as good assets. If they screw up a mission and sit around waiting for a fixer to call them to get them a job, i have them sit around for over a month paying bills without a job. As for karma raising things, i don't let players raise things when they have the karma, they also have to train and use the skill, spell, attribute, before they can raise it. But i guess im a hard ass.

I would try not to give more then 7 karma to any player, and as for money, depends on the job but i think you are okay as long as those totals are per person. Try to push to them that sometimes there is money to be made on the side, some prototypes that arnt part of the run, some data they find, magical items they find, all good sources of extra income.

As for advancing your tiers, try sending them to exotic locations and do runs on top secret installations and against heads of states or corporations. There are a lot of cool magical sites in the world to send a runner.

I won't comment karma/nuyen payouts and other technical details, but focus on the campaign itself.

First of all, it looks like you want your players to avoid killing. Nothing wrong with that, but I think it'd be a good idea to tell it to them straight and make sure they agree with you. If they want to play cold mercenaries, or are in a more cinematographic mood and want bloody battles, they'll be disappointed when they discover that they get punished for killing.

Mission #1: Make sure to make the scene "realistic": if the gangers realize that they're up against a team of runners, they're very likely to call off the attack.

Mission #3: I know that it's not an uncommon idea, but I've got a few problems with it. An actress might want to see what the shadows look like to help her get into the role, but it's very unlikely that she'd want to become a criminal and shoot people in the face. And even if her agent accepted to let her have a closer look at the Shadows, he'd probably hire a small army of legal, competent and loyal bodyguards and find someone to give her a tour of the Shadow world (a tour which probably wouldn't go very deep in the shadows) instead of letting her go with a group of SINless and lawless criminals. As for becoming the personal bodyguard of an actress, this qualifies as a "get out of the Shadows for free" card (provided she can get him a legal SIN) and the character will probably be unable to keep on shadowrunning (even if we ignore the fact that he probably won't need to anymore).

In my opinion as an experienced GM, you plan far too much ahead.

The entire "Thou shalt not kill." thing is not my cup of tea but all in all I enjoyed reading it ... well with the exception of the vampire ninjas of course.

It's "laundromat", although I suppose in a dystopian future, spelling could have changed.



Beware the GMPC! That way lies death. If you must put in a Street Sam, give him a tremendous disability, like he has no legs and constantly shakes, otherwise he will quickly be far too cool for everyone else. Plus, runners should be few and far between. If he's washed out, it also gives them a sense of how dangerous the shadows are.



I have never seen a Shadowrun game where you get karma based on the kill count. Unless this is how your players want to run, I would avoid it. There are entire threads here on whether it is better to kill or disable, so making it cut and dry doesn't help to address this, one of the most basic aspects of the dystopian world. If you must drive the point home, make it clear that the most stuff in the store they bust and the more customers they kill, the less reward money the store owner will give them in the end (this discourages shooting, and civilian deaths, which in turn will discourage them from killing the gangers, without somehow making killing gangers "bad"). If the manager comes out and says "thank you, thank you, you saved my store but... You did like 10k nuyen of damage. Any reward money I would have for you is going to repairs now." (Note, he probably says this from behind the bulletproof window he was hiding behind the whole time, so they can't mug him.)

Also, something like 10 karma is obscene for a mission like this. When I run Food Fight, the party gets away with 3 karma per person, approximately.



This is also why it's better to kill 'em dead Why do you want to moralize it the other way? Morals are for wusses. Kill 'em dead.



Again, not huge on GMPC. What if Biggs accompanies in VR/AR space only, or talking over the radio? Than it's just the party on their own again, without the risk of the GM hogging the spotlight.

In case you're wondering, I've run three or four campaigns, including many with completely new players. I've never once had to include a GMPC (except once as the driver and to provide astral overwatch for a group with no mage and no rigger), they learn fine on their own.

Or the die. But thems the breaks.



Each, right?




Consider how you want to portray shadowrunners. I don't know about SR4, but in SR3, they generally work because they stay in the shadows, rather than get their names or faces attached to, well, anything. Consider instead that she isn't making a movie about Shadowrunners (a specific group), but more of an Oceans 11 'morally upright thieves with too many toys', and the runners are just hired as bodyguards who seem interesting to her. If you don't mind Shadowrunners having shoes named after them though, this isn't really a concern.

Of the possible events, I'd drop #1 as being too out there, but the other ones work fine.

Also, again, you give out a TON of karma. Is this an SR4 thing? I'd never give more than, absolute cap, 12 karma for an entire run, as low as 3. Never 3 karma just for talking someone out of something. Also note that your karma is way outpacing your cash. Great for the mages, but the sams and the like will hate you (unless this is another SR4 thing).



Looks good (although again, no idea why the karma penalty. Your "in the future" sums up the results well enough without penalizing them) from this low level of detail. Post again when you have the layout etc. and we can comment on that too

Same with #5 (vampire ninjas, cool! I hope this is explained later, though.)



Did I miss something? Where is SILKE MISSION #5? It seems everyone is coming back then.

Also, it seems an odd thing that everyone left alive comes back to haunt the party later. I have to assume that most people who are left alive just pick up the pieces and move on. I'd be wary of overusing that. For instance, in the last one, the surviving ninjas probably won't be sent, but the information may result in a fresh ninja team being sent (and the players aren't penalized any more for 10 ninjas surviving than for 1 surviving, in fact to the contrary, if all 10 survive whoever sent them may assume the PCs aren't especially strong, so won't dedicate a lot in the way of resources on squashing them, while if only 1 survives, clearly the bad guy needs to send a LOT MORE to beat the PCs.)

wow thanks for the response guys (and possibly gals, not to assume )

BTW, first off, sorry i forget to edit some of the file before i copy/pasted it from my computer. Thus the mentions of Silke Missions (a later tier). and also I'm posting this at 7 at night after a long die of grading papers and teaching teenagers to love shakespere so I'm going to be jumping around.

I'll look over my rewards a little, we always had pretty low rewards in my old groups, usually having a balance of low nyn/high karma and vice versa.
in the past we've also used the cash for karma rule. which allowed players to sell off money to get karma.

Our formula has always been 3D6 X 100 nyn for 1+1D6 Karma. But now looking back that I probably wont be using that this game; I should probably rethink the rewards.

on the matter of the low body count, basically I've always had this problem with over done killing in SR missions (if you ever played the 1st ed adventure DNA/DOA, the number is HUGE!!!) to me it seems unprofessional to leave a pile of bodies lying around everywhere. I mean most corp security guards are just regular joes looking for work, not hard ass pro corpers looking to smoke every runner they meet.

But some missions, like the Stone of Orbis, where the runners will go up against a group of elite mercenaries, the gloves are off.

Also the idea of some enemies coming back to haunt the runners is one of the best ways, in my opinion to give the feel of a "real world".

Thanks again I'll edit it more and if anyone is interested I'll email them the mission info, in case they want to play test any of this for me.

I have to get back to my kids' papers. good night and good luck.

If leaving opponents alive results in them most often coming after the team with reinforcements, then the players are STUPID to leave them alive.

If you want the players to not kill people you need to penalize them for killing people, not for NOT killing people. Have their sisters, their parents or their kids come after the players.

Karma is all well and good, but it's like this:

"Here's a gun. See that guy over there? Yeah, that scumbag tied to the chair? I'll give you a million dollars if you let him go or 100,000 bucks if you kill him. Oh, and if you let him go he'll hunt you down and kill everyone you love next month."

So, what are YOU going to do?

I leave it up to you if you want to use a Karma<->Nuyen exchange in your game, but if you do, I strongly recommend not using the above system. There are two reasons why.
First, the exchange rate is significantly in favor of Karma - considering that 2,500 Nuyen is aproximately equal to 1 Karma, this would allow them to trade a maximum of 1,800 Nuyen for a minimum of 2 Karma.
Second, there is the problem of being random. This can significantly unbalance players characters based purely on luck. If someone gets lucky, & trades in their 5,000 Nuyen for 20 Karma, & someone else has bad luck, ending up trading in 40 Karma for 3,000 Nuyen, there is a huge balance issue.

If you do decide to use a Karma<->Nuyen exchange, I suggest the following, taken from my persona Karma Character Generation rules.

Optional Rule: Gamemasters may allow Karma <-> Nuyen exchange during game play. The conversion rate is 1 Karma per 2,500 Nuyen, or 2,500 Nuyen per 1 Karma. This can be explained as good luck with the lottery (Karma to Nuyen), donating funds & time to a cause (Nuyen to Karma), or anything else that feels appropriate for the character. Characters may only exchange 1 Karma or 2,500 Nuyen per game session this way. Gamemasters may allow an increased number of such exchanges in sessions with extended downtime, at their discretion.

Backgammon demonstrates that he has t3h r34l GM-fu. Because he's seriously right.

DNA/DOA wasn't a Shadowrun adventure, it was a D&D dungeon crawl in Shadowrun...



If you want to discuss this further, you'd better start a new thread if you don't want this one to be derailed.



I think it's much better to have contacts, friends, neighbors and other NPCs the PC will meet daily. Don't get me wrong, enemies coming back can be good too, but I think that if you want to give a real world feeling, you should rather focus on day to day life than on missions and enemies (that is if you and your players are interested in playing this. If you just want to play missions, feel free to do so, it's your game).

What you can also do is make it more complicated than friends and foes. Your runners might befriend some other runners before facing them during a run, or the other way around. It's important to give depth to every NPCs, even when they're only supposed to be recurrent enemies.

As an aside, I DO like that you bring enemies back, but it seems like almost all of the enemies come back, which is a bit higher than what I think should be statistically average. One or two in the campaign would make sense, unless the runners somehow make it personal (like shooting the daughter of the family in front of the parents just to show how mean they are).