I'm a new SR4 GM, with plenty of experience running everything else (DnD, HERO, DH, GURPS, etc) but SR. I've been gaming since 1986, and now find myself with this monumental task of making Emergence work for my players. I want this to be one that's remembered as "one of the all time great campaigns." As we've been together since '87 or so, you can imagine what's before me to impress these folks with.

I've gone off the rails a bit, trying to link the various events into one vast conspiracy, with an NPC duo (Anslem, a Christian Theurge and Marlowe, his Elizabethan-speaking Ghoul assistant) directing the 'runners to clues found in the book. Occasionally, I'll run one as a seemingly-random event or a run drawn from some other source, but I want to stick to Emergence as my main plot.

Would anyone care to discuss how they handled this book?

I made an electronic music piece narrating the intro fiction for the last chapter of the book. Came out fairly well.

is there anything you did NOT do at least once concerning shadowrun? O.o

Never had sex with someone while LARPing Shadowrun. Yet. Good things come to those who wait.

Short version:
I worked the events of Emergence into an entirely different campaign that I was running at the time of the book's release.

Long version:
The players were sent to Hong Kong to retrieve some incense that was required as a component to an enchantment that an NPC was performing. While they were in Hong Kong, it just happened to be the day that the TMs escaped and the city descended into chaos. They actually ended up assisting both TMs and MCT by the end of that little scene, IIRC.

The next Emergence-y run happened in Canada when a corp studying an AI that was born from a random number generator who styled herself after the goddess Eris was hit by the players. During that run, the AI was released into the matrix and escaped. This AI, in the metaplot of this campaign, and Pulsar -- the one who later deals with Sojourner and the Azzie satellite that he had -- are arch enemies for reasons I never determined and the players never investigated.

It was shortly after this release that Sojourner took over the Azzie satellite and the players realized what Eris had been -- they originally thought she was either a free sprite or a super agent of some kind which, I guess, she sort of was. Some of the TMs that they had rescued from Hong Kong had relocated to LA where they were working with Pulsar and Horizon to try and control Eris. Pulsar couldn't handle Sojourner and Eris at the same time, so the TMs were trying to help him out against the other AI. The players were called in to provide some meat-muscle for the TMs while Pulsar handled things in space. Thus, they headed down the coast to LA, met up with the TMs who lived in a sort of floating city of the coast, protected them from a large number of drones and other TMs who had been corruped by Eris, and eventually one their way through. Meanwhile, Pulsar handled Sojourner and the world was saved.

This was all before Unwired so I was making up stuff for dissonant TMs and entropic sprites all over the place. It was a good time, overall.

I ran a really focused campaign about the remnants of a Barrens gang having one of their members snapped up by a corporate goon squad for being a VK. The gangers wound up becomming 'runners out of necessity. The events of Emergence were basically a backdrop. I think that the only things that the players were directly involved with from the book were some runs about outing Joey D as a Technomancer, and the race for the drone that Sojourner sent shooting toward Earth. Everything else was background material, with the story really being driven by the PC's desire to get their friend back.

I have my campaign set in Hong Kong, so I've been able to keep a lot of the stuff "canon" so to speak. I usually have a main theme around my campaigns until i switch "seasons" so to speak. Last season I was mainly focused around some Master Shedim that infiltrated a more militant branch of 9x9, but I was still able to work in some of the "clues" of System Anomalies and even had them do the Tunnel Vision run. I think what you are doing will work fine. Now that I've moved into the Revelations and Witchhunt parts of the timeline I've decided that I would link them all together in a story about uncovering and breaking up a plot by Mitsuhama to undermine the struggling PPG and increase their influence in China. It helps that I have a player playing a Technomancer for this "season" as the events become more personal for him. I recommend not trying to shoe horn every adventure into your campaign, as it might not be the type of run your players may enjoy. If you really want them to try every idea, I suggest tailoring it to their play style. Blast From the Past works great if your group likes extensive and elaborate B&E Ocean's Eleven type play. If they like a straight up fight instead, you can tailor it to be a hit by the Yakuza to keep info about Shalbermat from being sold by some Triad who got it by shaking down someone in the know working for MCT. Or they could be hired by said Triad to bodyguard the data fence they have looking to sell the data while MCT and their Yak allies look for a way to keep the info contained. That's what I love about the "framework" idea of the adventures. It allows a lot of flexibility for you to use the ideas in adventures you want to create.

Emergence is a really good 'ideas' book basically. It is fantastic for giving inspiration on how to handle the migration from SR3 to SR4 but not fantastic if you want a pre-generated adventure or a 'run of a lifetime'. Ghost Cartels notwithstanding (because I haven't read it) those days seem to be behind us for now. Last "run of a lifetime" I read was Brainscan. I'm still kicking myself I never got around to running that one, or the Harlequin series.

I think Double Exposure is the LAST adventure I remember running that my PCs considered epic.

- J.

When humanity falls, squirrels shall inherit the earth.

Feel the wrath of my Nuts!

I've only really recently started GM'ing a regular game, and it's in early stages, but I've dropped some emergence fluff. The team's hacker woke up to my first IC post for him, and the trid turned on in his motel coffin, and it was a rerun of "Beyond Belief", or whatever that trashy show with the novelty technomancer. I didn't just transcribe the whole thing, I threw a few lines in inbetween paragraphs.

Another character has a girlfriend who's quite sick and living in his Barrens squat. He didn't specify what she has, so I think I might decide for him that his girlfriend has AIPS and maybe a NEOnet/MCT AIPS outreach program picks her up and decides she's a candidate for VK vivisection.

I'm halfway through Emergence now. I'm pulling much of the Jackpoint message board material into emails that I sent to my players as teases of what was to come. I've put together my own adventures, of varying length, using most of the seeds presented. Unfortunately, I TPK'd my players' PCs during the "Frederick Gunn-run" in LA. That was a bummer because I put together a kickass map of a rooftop shanty-town island in the LA flood plains.