A group of us has been getting together about once a month, go through a run in a day, and that’s about it. They use the same characters each time too. I’ve either made up my own runs, or used the Shadowrun missions. This is fun, but it has no story arc: nothing to really get involved in.

I had a conversation with one of my players recently about Shadowrun about this. He agrees that it is missing the overall story arc. I feel it needs more of a campaign experience. My problem is, I only have experience running missions that last about 4-6 hours and the mission is complete.

How do you write a campaign for Shadowrun? What things can you do to make it feel like a campaign?

I heard Ghost Cartel’s is more like a module. Is that true? Is it a 160 page module?

Any help, or pointers, would be helpful. I’ve bought most of the new Shadowrun books and I’d hate to go back to D&D for the sake of giving my players a campaign type experience.

All you need for an SR campaign is for the characters to have a good reason to be together, and goals that they need to achieve. Sit them down and figure out what they want to do. Ask them what kind of campaign they want. Figure out what their characters want and why that requires shadowrunning. I usually ask what just happened to the characters to kick off the campaign.

Really, if you want long-term play, the actual runs should be just means to an end - something you do because you need the resources and contacts that running provides. Let the players lead you, and you can just keep rolling with it.

do several smaller runs and drop some hints that they might be connected somehow, even if it does not look like it . .
if they don't take the bait, just have whoever is building their Ultima Ratio Regum try and get rid of them because they MIGHT figure it out some day . . if they don't try and get revenge, nothing will get them to acknowledge something like that in shadowrun *g*

One possibility would be to hire a team not only for one mission, but for a series of interconnected runs against the same corporation.
In this case, make sure to have the player's actions influence the development of that corporation in a visible way (if the target corp is a AAA, you may want to choose a specific branch of the corp as a target).

Make sure to transport the impression that they run in a living, interactive world.

-let the characters move up from deniable assets to trusted freelancers to full-time corporate employees.
Introduce them further into the corporate world as the campaign moves on.

-let the target corporation react to being assaulted all the time, ramping up security, probably with countermeasures that are visibly a direct reaction to the team's preferred tactics- not because you're trying to come up with a tailor-made opposition (that would, IMHO, be kinda lame), but because the runners have teached the corp a lesson and they learned it the hard way.

-let the team acquire new enemies, as well as new allies.

-the succes of the team's Johnson could lead to backstabbing within the J.'s own corporation, as he is perceived as an upcomming rival by a colleague.
Of course, the runners get involved.

-show how constant hits to the target corp slowly trash their reputation, the rating of their stocks, their market dominance.
Likewise, portray the rise of the employer corp (building a new, representative arcology, having an ad campaign for a product the runners helped "develop" all over the local media and so on).




If you want D&D-style, epic story arcs, you will, of course, need a D&D style epic opposition.
If you don't care too much about the official timeline, the whole Bug City stuff may be great for this.
Of course, you can replace the bugs with any other threat of similar scale, be it magical, technological or mundane.


Also, in any case, make sure that you have tangible, developing interaction between the group and their contacts.
Keep in mind the effects of Street Cred, Bad Rep and Publicity.

The best advise, however, would be to make each player come up with the following :
- a long-term motivation for his character
- an idea as to how how the PC's personality could develop (a mage getting obsessed with power, a revenge-seeking mercenary learning to come to terms with his anger, a shapeshifter slowly adapting to metahuman society and so on) and what events or experiences could cause such a development.
- a potential enemy or rival (this one could also be applied to the whole group)
-some ideas to flesh out their contacts
-NPCs that aren't necessarily contacts, dependants or enemies, but other people the character knows and who are important to him

Make sure that the group's members talk to you and each other about this and figure out ways how the motivations of the various characters could interact.
Think of possible story elements for each character- what connects these elements is what could make up your next campaign.

My suggestion is to go over the backgrounds of the PCs, and use that to develop the overall story arc (looking at their contacts helps). Note that this may mean some runs are just runs for the money. Other runs may have a significant impact on the arc, and possible change its direction.

You noted you create your own runs and use the published adventures. I would strongly encourage you to create your own rather than the published adventures. Incorporating a published adventure would require a rework of the adventure. This rework may take as much work as creating the adventure itself.

That being said, the story arc may or may not be apparent to the players.

I do it differently that TheGothfather: I come up with a story that I'd like to tell and then develop a series of episodic events that could tell that story assuming that the players are the main characters. Then, I storyboard the entire thing the way I think it might play out looking at the way different bad guys would react, what are the corps/government/dragons/etc. going to do, that sort of stuff. Then, I ignore all of those plans and let the players have at it.

The point of all the up-front work is to understand the story and the NPC players within it as completely as possible. Then, with the understanding that the players will most likely not take the same actions that I foresee, I improvise connections between their story and my story until, by the end of the campaign, the result is some sort of amalgamation thereof.

For example, I had an idea last night that may or may not get fleshed out for the future: a balls-to-the-wall revenge plot like in Kill Bill. The correlation between the idea and the movies didn't occur to me until today, but that's beside the point. The players would all be victims of the same plot. They would sacrifice their money, time, energy, and Essence to run the shadows in an effort to bring about the ruin of that plot. I'd let players create characters who would be those shadowrunners.

Meanwhile, I'd design the plot that they got caught up within. Perhaps it's a plot by a corporation to disenfranchise a group of people to enhance their own profits. Let's say that there's a number of smaller food-production corps that are looking to band together and try to help protect each other a giant of the food-production world: Aztechnology. They're reasonably successful and generally doing well for themselves until they're squashed like bugs. Here's the twist: it wasn't the Azzies that did the squishing. Instead, it could be almost any other competitor of the Azzies, though at the moment I lean toward Horizon in my head. They squash the little guy in an attempt to discredit the Azzies.

What they didn't expect is some Punisher-eske player characters to come out of the woodwork and start to invest heavily in determining what went wrong, who did it, and seeking revenge. Maybe one's daughter died of a disease after the parent lost his or her job. Another might have been evicted and had their entire life savings lost when the stock of their company dried up, etc. All things that would push someone out of the normal corp life and into the shadows. These backgrounds would be up to the players, but I'd provide guidance about the types of characters that would fit best in the game. And, if someone want to place a mercenary or war veteran or something else, it's not too hard to include that concept in the game: the others hire the mercenary to provide the muscle and defense to their little group.

So how does this become a campaign? In short, you have to start providing questions to the players that need answering:

* Who gave the order to end their businesses?
* How can be get our revenge?
* What supplies do we need to do it?
* We just lost all of our assets; how do we afford our revenge?

Stuff like that. As the player characters begin to answer those questions, they can do runs on the Azzies (obviously not right away or only very carefully) or maybe they do smaller runs and then hire better shadowrunner to do the hard work (secondary characters used for a one-short kill-fest on an Azzie corp, perhaps?). This lets the players determine the destiny.

Meanwhile, I get to have my fun by figuring out how Horizon -- or who ever the "real" bad guy turns out to be -- interacts with this. At what point do they realize the revenge mission of the player characters? Once they do so, do they help them in their fight against the Azzies or do they work harder to obfuscate their own part in the player characrters' downfall? Probably both, actually. Either way, the NPCs in the plot should be proactive in some cases and reactive in others, but they should never be static within the game.

That's how I handle it. Hopefully it helps you out.

Dashifen's method works well, too. Just goes to show there's really no "wrong" way to create a campaign. My contention would be that it becomes less about what's fun for the players, and more about what's fun for the GM. I dislike "plot." I'd rather let the players be proactive, and make the game about them.

If you're interested in how my group comes up with campaigns, you can check out this thread. It's the world-burning that we did for the Burning Wheel game that we're starting this weekend. There's going to be a lot of stuff not relevant to SR, since it's got an established setting, but the process works equally well for pretty much all games.

EDIT: In case you're curious, I'm Shaun in that thread. Randy's the GM. Babe is my wife, and the other host of our podcast. Amnesiac's one of our regular players.

Campaigns, unlike Athena, don't necessarily leap out fully formed. They can evolve.

Ask what is happening in between those runs, or around those runs. The world outside of those runs is infinite. Stuff happens there. It does effect them in the long run. Make the connections!

Ask a player what their characters favorite drink is. Make sure there is a mission later that involves their favorite drink. Bring back something that tied their character to the world. (Perhaps the Johnson orders that PC favorite drink for them, this is a clue how much the Johnson knows about the PC.)

Ask their character who their neighbors are. During a much later shadowrun that formerly nameless gunned down security guard turns out to be their neighbor. How do they find out? Maybe during the run, or perhaps they notice the funeral when they go home a couple days later.

Add a tiny bit of "fluff" to every game session. Re use or revisit that piece of "fluff" in a different context in a later session. Make it personal for each PC.

I must admit I am new to Shadowrun (not the setting but the table top) I definatily have an arcing story concerning the race for governor as detailed in Runner's Havens but i'm kinda running it by the seed of my pants...

Things are starting to come together in a really tangable way, but in actuallity I hate running games like this, I like having a whole campaign planned before I run it, or at least outlined...so I would recommend drawing up an outline of events, and like everyone else suggests make sure the runner's actions have some sort of impact on the world around them...it will make the players feel more important.

Writing your own missions campaigns is the best way to learn, though I think after I am done with this I may run a few pre generated adventures and see how they go.

-Josh

A lot depends on what the players want as ongoing story. One idea is to create a long-term plot that can be made up into several missions - perhaps a corp war, or a eco-group's quest to get sufficient evidence to bring down a company for malfeasance in the corporate court. Another idea is to have several, smaller arcs overlap (an A, B, and C story where you have a couple of missions for the A story, then one for the B, then another for A but C interrupts, and so on). Someone upthread suggested runs that look unconnected at first but actually are - that's a good idea, but it seems like your players want something more overt.

The way our group handles a "campaign" is through character subplots. One guy is in debt to the Vory, so that complicates his life. Another is an Xchange member. A third is dealing with a life that he'd tried to leave behind but that he keeps bumping into. It's even easier if most of these plots are "social," since Shadowrunners tend to go to clubs or talk to contacts and you can add in whatever elements you like as side-conversations.

Alright so for SR campaigns there are things like the modules (Bug city was mentioned of course, Renraku arcology shutdown is another).

If you want a little epic in there you can start off light with the "Harlequin" adventure and then blow their minds with "Harlequins back".

However I would contend that SR doesn't need a "campaign". It's a distopianish future and to be honest campaigns tend to add a black and whiteness as well as overly clear direction that doesn't jibe as well with the scene.

Rather I prefir to do two things with SR.

Develop the NPCs and character relations to everyone. In D&D there may have been an epic campaign. But two months after it's over the players usually can't name or really describe in any meaningful way any of the NPCs that they didn't kill. I'm pretty sure I could dial up people from groups I had years ago and they'll still remember their NPC girlfriend, and a few others. They'll also remember the stuff they did in downtime. Like drag racing wheelchairs (ah the things that happens when a runner loses their legs and has to wait for replacements).

Also the past has a way of coming up in SR. People remember them, actions have consequences they run into later etc.

A campaign is often as simple as finding a hook.

The last campaign I ran for SR started with the line "We never should have stolen that damn Banshee."
From there we fleshed out who the players had stolen a 2 million nuyen tricked out Banshee from, why, and how. From there the campaign basically had the players on the run, doing runs to make the bills so they could keep moving and not get caught by the very pissed off mafiosos who they ripped off the Banshee from.

Arc-plots can also evolve naturally out of the action; in that same campaign one run saw the group hired to demolish a meth lab. What they didn't realise was that the facility was actually part of a pedophile human trafficking operation. They very nearly killed four innocent kids before they thought to check all the upstairs rooms. Once the run was over they had four meth addicted kids on their hands, a burning desire to kill the sick freaks responsible for it all, and the added problem that, unknown to them, a wealthy and well connected politician desperately wanted to keep certain parts of his private life private, and they were now holding all the evidence.

I added a subplot by having one of the kids emerge as a Technomancer. The game was set in 2070, so the Technomancer in the party was the only person around who could really help her deal with what she was going through.

I've found that Shadowrun, as a setting, is best suited to a kind of "living world" approach to plot building. It's less a matter of running some huge "zomg the world is going to end" storyline as it is about finding ways to get the players connected with their world; their country, their city, or the street they live on. A plot can be something as simple as "A gang war just broke out on the street where you grew up."

Part of the problem, of course, is that all too often Runner's exist without any kind of connections. They have contacts that are basically just business partners. They have no family, no friends, no places or people that matter to them. They care about nothing but money. I'm not saying they have to be good people or anything; even a selfish person can get angry about his old house being demolished to make way for a Smoothie Bar. He might even be selfish enough to break into the company, steal the planning permission documents to hold up work, and then pull a clever swindle that lands the property in the hands of a fake identity that he has set up. Does it really benefit him? No, not really, but people are irrational like that. They don't always behave in sensible ways, even when acting in their own interests.

That's more or less how I do things, if I need to let the story out some than i can always add discrete runs based off of backstory and contacts. This keeps runs relevant to the group, helps develop a more interactive world and allows for different story-telling opportunities that the players feel more responsible for. Those subplots are great for bringing in villains without tipping your handy to the main baddy when it comes up.

This^

Generally shadowrun is what you make it. Epic behavior, fun or fights is dependent on the group. Start the toons out low powered and they will feel even street level challenges to be epic in nature. Failing that let the guys start off as proffesionals with a history, and let that history guide you. The only real RULE in shadowrun is the characters you make arent just sheets of paper. They are "real" people, if you play them as such each has a story no matter how prosaic and that is what drives a good run.

If you want epic scale and you have a good mix of magic tech guns etc have them be hired by Ares or SK to go talislegging... in chi-town, or have an exec of SK have you go talislegging .... for his boss <--- fyi that last would be brutal to do to new players but oh so much fun cause then it WOULD be epic if they survive.

The sky is the limit for creativity.

edited to add in a hook for the idea of being hired to talislegg Lowfyr (in augmentation in the nanoware section under constructors read the first few comments about the pissed off SK execs being forced to live in that new arc they made with nanos for boning it up; that whole thing could give you SOOO many arcs its not funny) Heck even have them hired to hurt the arc in some way etc etc the possiblities are endless.

I find it very difficult to develop plots. Plots (in general) depend upon things following a preconceived sequence of events. But the actions of your players may (and likely will) not fall neatly into the preconceived pattern you have designed. So the only plot elements you can count upon happening is those that are not directly influence by the players actions, which don't tend to be very engaging. Unless you force circumstances to fit your plot which is also (in general) a bad idea and also not very engaging or pleasant for the players. So in general I am not that big fan of 'plots' per say.

Instead I like to develop recurring characters and see where the story takes them. Having recurring NPCs that your players take an interest in is a crucial element in designing a compelling campaign. Resist the temptation to graze over any PC - NPC interaction. Even if its just a quick two-minute RP session of a phone-call with a contact, never pass up the chance to reinforce to the PCs that the NPCs are more than just assets or foes, but characters in their own right with goals and desires as well. Half of a campaign is its characters in my opinion.

The other half of a campaign is its events. Instead of worrying about an overarching campaign plot, worry about how your players actions affect developments in their environment. Limiting your setting helps this a great deal. I like to stick to a single city and the politics of the shadows there-in. If the runners succed in a major run against the Yaks, the Mafia may grow in power. Now the Yaks are out for revenge, maybe against the runners, or maybe their just willing to spend some cash and hire the runners to hit somebody back. What you want to do here is make the players feel like their actions have serious effects on the society.

If you pay attention to those two factors, continuity will come easily to your campaign, even without an overarching plot. The only other suggestion I would make is to sprinkile your runs with elements that can be turned into 'plot hooks' or means to tie a future adventure into a past one. Just gently influence the situation so that there are always some unaswered questions, or dangling plot lines at the end of most runs. That one bad guy that got away. What it is exactly that that magical dohikey/wizbang gizmo does. Some GM's view dangling plot lines as a bad thing and take efforts to clean them up for their players. I say don't! They are precious gold for you. Pick out some really interesting ones and base a later run upon it. I like to do about a 50/50 ratio of new runs and runs that tie (at least tangentially) to an old run.

Lastly I would repeat my earlier advice of limiting your campaign setting. The smaller the environment you players run in, the easier it will be to keep them engaged in the events there in. This can very upon your tastes, but in general I find there is a direct correlation between a characters power, and the setting they should play in. The more powerful they are, the bigger the setting. BUT I like to stay at an 'average' power level. The players are strong enough to affect things in a city, but not so far removed that the details get left out, and I find it is the details which are the most compelling.

What? Just rip off of Metal Gear. Done.

Thank you all! That is a wealth of information. I now see I need to spend more time on getting to know my PC's, and especially the NPC's. I have never really been well at fleshing out NPC's, even in my D&D days. But its never to late to start.

What have your PC's found fun for an overall theme? Corp on corp runs? Working for the mafia/yaks/vory?

By the way, what is talislegging? If I'm reading you comment right, Spark, you are saying have the runners go into Chi-town (formerly Bug City) and look for magic goodies for a corp, and then make it a survival based campaign?

Great! Honestly, once you start to see you NPCs as characters, and play them as such. Everything gets much, much easier.


We like to do a mix of everything. Its all mixed up in the shadows after all. The fun thing about playing shadowrunners, is that you are very much a part of the shadows, but your not necessarily part of any one group. So today's ally can be tomorrows enemy. There is no need to get tied down to work for (or against) any one group. Unless of course your players want to.

Also, different groups bring different terms to the table. A Corp may be very concerned about maintaining the 'deniability' of their actions. The Vory may not care. In fact, they might WANT the opposition to know they authorized the hit.

I say develop a couple prominent Johnson, then let the players reactions to them, and the results of the runs determine things. Any time they players have a successful run, for a Johnson, you might want to consider developing him as a contact. The players will cackle in glee at getting another asset (a contact) when in reality, you have just planted another campaign hook in them. Of course, if the run goes badly, that Johnson might become a determined enemy. Shadowrun is one of the few games in which players can have just as much fun failing as they do succeeding.

Lastly, limit yourself to the obvious choices for Johnsons. Anybody could conceivably hire the PCs for a run. I have a 4-5 player group, and like to give out 10-20k a run, per player. Thats only 40k-100k in cost for the Johnson. Not an incoievable sum for a wide range of characters, especially if they are willing to cash out some of their physical assets, or have something valuable they could give in trade.

Oh god MGS2 was awful. I DON'T NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE BOSS-DUDE'S GRADES WERE IN PRIMARY SCHOOL! JUST SHUT UP AND LET ME FIGHT HIM ALREADY! Plot critical info only before a bossfight, seriously guys.

Talislegging is bootlegging magical goods. Usually rare (or highly illegal) radicals or components. Could also be any other type of magical thing, foci, weapon focus, spell formula, etc....

Quoted for truth.

My suggestion is that, if you're up to it, make up NPC personalities on the fly. They're talking to a drug dealer? Maybe he dips into what he sells. Make him a little spacey but also twitchy at the same time. Improvise the living shit out of your self and have a good time doing it. Then, for the love of all things holy, take notes on the personalities you inject into the game so that you can keep them as consistent as possible in the future.

Ghost Cartels is not a "module" per se, not in the sense of On the Run or any of the SR Missions adventures. Ghost Cartels is a campaign or "plot" book. It details a series of significant events in the Shadowrun world and talks about how they affect the SR world. Through the description of these events, the book gives several "adventure frameworks." These are not "full" adventures like the Missions ones but are a "rough sketch" of an adventure that is ready for you as GM to fill out into a full adventure. On the plus side, the book does provide full stats for the NPCs involved in these adventures as well as maps of a few key locations. Ghost Cartels will have that "overall plot" that your players are looking for because it gives an overall reason (metaplot) for the characters going on Shadowruns. I really can't say enough good things about it.

If you want a campaign of connected runs that are fully written out (like the Missions ones) then I would recommend either Brainscan or Survival of the Fittest, as both of these have a big "change the world" kind of feel to them that would be familiar to D&D players.. Both of them are written with SR3 rules but could be converted with a little work into SR4.

I completely agree. In fact, the best way to make NPCs in my experience is to start simple - write down a brief note on the relationship he/she has with one or more PCs, a motivation, and a vague idea of what kind of direction you might like to go. Then, see what happens in a session and use those details to flesh out what you started with. And, if one should get killed, or the PCs aren't interested, you don't have to abandon pages and pages of notes and plans!

I have a friend, one of the hosts of the Narrative Control podcast who has a really cool way of creating personalities for NPC's on the fly. May be helpful. You can find it here.

Partially because fleshed out NPCs are an abnormality in D&D. I tried running a D&D campaign with just a touch of intrigue, warfare and conflicting NPC plotlines, and all I got was blank looks from the players. Heck there wasn't even a dungeon.

I had the great good fortune to play in an AD&D campaign that was fleshed out magnificently -- NPCs, plots and subplots, geography and geology, extra-planar intrigue, gods manipulating us like pawns and some of them getting their comeuppance, gut-busting humour, love affairs, PC personality growth -- the whole nine yards.

And I got to go home with the Dungeon Master.

Peter

You are the luckiest geek alive, you know this, right?

When beginning a game, do you take a look at the players contacts and start to develop their personalities (aka, prepare them ahead of time)? I think another thing our group was missing is what goes on in the down time. We just did the runs, and that was it, due to lack of time. Although we got more runs in, I do not think it is worth the sacrafice of potential character/NPC development.

I will check out Ghost Cartels. Is it pretty easy to take stuff from a plot book and turn it into a run/campaign? Is Emergence also a plot book?

Thanks again fellow dumpshockers. This has been a great help.

I take a look at some of the contacts (if the PC only has 2 or 3 I'll do them all) and start from there. As for down time, the best thing to do is PBEM (play by e-mail) between sessions. Since that usually doesn't involve much dice rolling.

Yes, I know. Though, now the GM and I go home to different people, in different cities a continent apart.

Peter

Yes, I find it easier to make a campaign out of a plot book because the "seeds" of run ideas are presented there for you. Ghost Cartels already has several Adventure Frameworks ready to be filled out along with several other adventure ideas. The events in Ghost Cartels are ripe full of places to plug in runs.

Yes, Emergence is also a plot book about the revelation of Technomancers to the public. Though it was not widely popular, I still think its a good book. It doesn't have as many Adventure Frameworks as Ghost Cartels does, nor does it have full stats for NPCs or maps of key locations, so it will require more work to turn the events in Emergence into runs in a campaign but it certainly doable.

ZOMG character development.

Sounds like a decent sub-plot to me!

You mean you've never run a game for a room full of hot chicks? You're missing out.
(The roleplaying society at my university hasn't actually had a male president in the last... four years now I think)

you suck!
you suck, you suck you suck!
yyoouu ssuucckk!!
._.

Where are you playing, Lesbos?

Perhaps 'were the luckiest geek alive' would have been a better phrasing then? =P


...you have no idea how much I hate you right now.

So, which Uni is this and how do I get there? >.>

Let's all take a road trip to the Doctor's college.

I could never really relate to the common complaint of many gamers as far as the opposite sex is concerned, as I've hardly ever run a game that didn't include at least two women.

only ever played SR with 2 girls however, hottest girl in my class was one of my buddies on CS.... total shock when i found out we were from the same town even more of a shock when I realized we knew each other and were friends, even better when she invited me to her swim parties. Nothing beats hanging out with an absolutely GORGEOUS chic in a bikini while talking gaming and knocking back vodka(s).

Next time you see a bikini female like that tell the DM you attempt to disbelieve. It's probably a gnarled old sorceress using some illusion spell.

Nope. Got even luckier.

Peter

Urge to kill... rising...


>.>

Making notes is the key. I write notes all the time while we play, and then type up a summary of the session as part of preparing for the next session. In addition to that, all NPCs and location data gets sorted in their own files. It makes improvising as well as handling a campaign easier.

I'm not sure if it has been said, but don't be afraid to steal NPCs (or bits of NPCs) from TV, movies, books, history, or even people you have met. You don't have to reveal your source if it isn't all that obvious, but I have found that having a decent mental picture of someone I am making up on the fly can be a real boon.

I am sure it has been said, but I have recently been in the same problem...
I am new to shadowrun though, but I try to get some runs connected, I have a shadowrun campaign cooking, all made by myself, prolly not good compared to some of the gods on this site:D I try not to let it ONLY be campaign runs, I let the Johnson get some time to check out the stuff you gotten for him or the like. give the runners a good little small job meanwhile he does so, and if the Johnson is smart he will maybe use the same team if it was a success, then the team will prolly have that little "trust" so they might take another job from him=)

hope that made sense and was at least a little useable:)

Metapunk:)

Steal and borrow from everyone. Any PC posted here, for example, can become (part of) an NPC in your campaign. Same for locations. If you vary, modify and mix and match them, no one will be the wiser even if they know the source.

(Also, if you're pressed for time, I wrote some tips for making the most of your prep time as a GM. Aimed at D&D, but pretty much universally applicable.)

In terms of "mental pictures" I've known a few GMs who use the logic that the roleplaying game is essentially a film, and they will proceed to "cast" every NPC, saying which actor is playing them. It doesn't actually define the NPC in and of itself, but it gives people a good touchstone for their appearance, voice, and mannerisms.

It can also be a lot of fun to write up a character and then think "Who would I get to play this guy?"
(Naturally you have an unlimited budget for make-up and special effects. Screw reality and its limitations).

I make the players write them up themselves. They spent the points on the contacts, they reap the benefits of the contacts' info/gear/whatever, so they get the burden of writing them up and handing them over.

When running in campaign mode, how far apart your runs? A few days, one week, 2-3 weeks? Or do you just roll a d6 for how many days before the next fixer calls?