This is the first time I post here in Dumpshock. I used to play SR2 many years ago, when those books where translated to Portuguese and printed here in Brasil (yes, the most recent and only reference for Shadowrun in Portuguese is for SR2...), and now I'm back into Shadowrun again and trying to set up a game with the 4th edition rules and setting.

Being a Akira Kurosawa's fan, I was trying to figure out another day how to put together a street samurai character based in the main character of Yojimbo when I got this idea of creating a whole adventure around the street samurai archetype, inspired by The Seven Samurai. In this film, seven samurai are contracted by a small village to protect them against 40 bandits who are expected to attack at the time of the next harvest. Translating it to 2070 Seattle: Seven street samurai are contracted to defend the Plastic Jungles against 40 gangers who are expected to attack at the time of the next harvest. And maybe someone bigger and sinister is behind the gang raid and wanting something more from inside the Plastic Jungles than just their food supply...

The first thing now is to create the seven street samurai for the players to pick some of them while the others may be NPCs. In the film, even though the characters share the same "archetype" and similar backgrounds, each one is quite singular in personality. I think this is cool in an RPG because sometimes its common to find, for exemple, a mage character who is nothing more then "the groups mage" or the rigger who is just "the rigger". Since all the characters will be "the groups samurai", the players will be forced - or so I hope - to find roleplaying ways make each character different from the other. Sure, it will also depend on how well I write each character...

So my questions would be:
1) Anyone has some all-the-same-archetype-PCs game experience to share?
2) What do you think about using the Plastic Jungles as the village to defend? I believe it suits the role but maybe its too big (20 several kilometers diameter tents!) and maybe it is already well defended (the book says it deals with gang raids all the time). And does anyone have a better image of it then the ones in Runner Havens and New Seattle? I'm finding hard to imagine those gigantic circus tents full of tropical forests... And maps would be good, as an important part of the story is the defense strategy being designed by the PCs...

And sorry for my grammar and spelling... my writing in English is a little out of shape...

As soon as I read this, I thought of the Plastic Jungles - before I got to the end.

It is the PERFECT place to run it.

Runner Havens and New Seattle are the only books I know of with the info you're after. I don't think there are any maps though... but at least you can flesh it out?

Why does it have to be a big venue the Seven defend? Why can't it just be a local bar under gangland threat and the runners are friends with the owner? If you have one bar in contested gangland territory between two gangs both trying to hit the owner up for protection money, the runners could easily be stuck in the middle.

I also don't think you need to all be "samurai" per se. A regular party would be fine. Everyone has skills that could assist in a battle like that. Hackers/riggers to conduct electronic warfare. Mages to summon spirits, counter spells, gather intel, gun-bunnies to unleash the ordinance. Face characters could be trying to build up allies or negotiate, etc.

That's just my random idea.

- J.

The Plastic Jungles does seem way, way too large. I'd go with a bunch of squatters living in an old department store or a high school.

Heavier opposition. 40 gangers against 7 sams who know they are coming is suicide on the gangers' parts. And you might consider the sams not being on the defense but on the offense. Attacking the gangers before they even get to the Plastic Jungles.

So it is that in the movie there are 20 houses in the village, the same number of tents in the Plastic Jungles... And since there are no canon details and maps maybe I could flesh them out as you said. Or maybe use a smaller community or a specific target inside the Jungles instead of the whole place. It should also be a place with enough space and terrain variety for some interesting tactical play.

For the samurai, some of them will probably have access to magical and matrix habilities (a bushido-minded hacker!). But I like the character creation challenge of coming up with different unique variations of the same note. And I am trying to keep to the feeling of the movie, so the import part is that the characters are guided by some warrior code of conduct: in the movie, the seven accepted the job in exchange for three rice meals a day. Or maybe the characters accept the job when they find that the gang attack is sponsored by a corporation and they do it for the "fighting oppression" thing. I believe there was a thread about this in the forum recently, about some other than money motivation. And just as the eldest of the samurai says "there is the pleasure of the battle".




The seven in the movie does make a pre-emptive attack to the bandits hiding place and so may the PCs do against the gang. And I plan on making the gangers a little more dangerous than the normal. The bandits of the film had an advantage over the samurai as three of them were firing muskets. As I'm playing with this concept of adapting the most elements of the film I can, the gang will have access to some pieces of artillery (or maybe magic) that the PCS don't expect...

And thanks everyone for answering! I'll later post more details about this movie adaptation to see what you think.

The problem with 7 Samurai is that the seven were not all created equal. One was a total badass that could kill anyone, one was a wise old master, and one was his war buddy. But another samurai was a barely trained boy, and another was a happy go-lucky wood chopping vagabond, and the last was a farmer who just took someone's sword. Well that's only 6, I forget the last guy, but you get my drift. Sticking in 7 streetsams of equal power level wouldn't replicate the good parts of the films very well... I think only some of them should be street sams, others should be combat-capable but with varying degrees of combat ability -- if they're 7 fully buffed out samurai, they might as well be an army, and there won't be much of the impossible odds situation that made the movie good. To make it at all interesting, at minimum the sams will need to use sub-optimal weaponry, they'll need to be a little bit street level. I'm talking sports rifles, shotguns, pistols, bows, swords, and fists. No Ares Alphas, no MGL-12s, no rocket launchers, no hundreds of kilos of C-12, no ample supply of smart weapon platforms, no armies of combat drones... It would just be too easy if you had 7 samurais at the max power level for starting characters. If they're all going to be true street sams, I would probably go for a 3 Samurai (which is also a prime number!) approach. That would be a LOT easier to GM for...

Once you deal with the party, there's creating the opposition. I think one essential thing is to have the gangers have several big guns. Most of the gangers would have AKs or something, but there would be a few rocket launchers or similar uber weapons to represent the "guns" in the movie. Stopping those guns will be key to success, and infiltrating the enemy camp and stealing them will really turn the tide...

Of course, you'll also need a reason for the bandits to attack. They won't be stealing food like in the movie -- food is not that scarce, even in the barrens, and the kind of unflavored soy that poor squatters probably have hoarded would have a resale value of somewhere in the neighborhood of a poke in the eye. So maybe the villagers have a drug lab full of feel-good chems they were planning to offload later. Or maybe the whole village has been forced to make drugs for the bandits, and they've decided they'd rather keep the profits of their efforts, so they've hired some samurai. That could allow runners to actually make some money off the deal, but they'd have to protect the village and the supplies long enough for them to be sold and turned into cash. Or maybe instead of being paid in rice (a cheap commodity, but a staple of the economy,) they could be paid only in novacoke (another cheap commodity, and also a staple of the economy )

IIRC the food convoys going through the Barrens are armored and equipped with weapons.

Not necessarily... Make the gangers members of a top tier gang like the ancients and you could turn them into a reasonable threat. Also, by the sounds of it, this is a one off/mini campaign. It's pretty easy to just handwave the gangers into something scarier than the goomba's they usually are. No need to actually use the ganger grunts as they appear in the BBB

In keeping in the spirit of the movie I'd say have everyone remain Street Sams but I'd blend them with other archtypes to get the feel right.

Some ideas for archtypes (taken from the original character types)
Kambei: A veteran sam, he has a range of skills making him the most well rounded of the Sams
Gorobei: A specialist in longarms. The group's sniper.
Shichiroji: Either another generic sam, or possibly a stealth based sam. He's a tough one.
Heihachi: Not the best samurai in a fight, but his 'amicable nature' could be represented by his having medical skills to keep the team going.
Katsushiro: The youngest of the sams. He's on the cutting edge of technology though, represented by his matrix abilities.
Kyuzo: A Samurai/Physad hybrid who specializes in close combat and blade weapons.
Kikuchiyo: A sam with very little cyberware. He relies more on raw talent to get the job done. Possibly a troll.

That's exactly what I was thinking about! And I may give Kambei some social skills like Leadership, Negotiation and even Con because of the scene in witch he convinces the thief who took a child as hostage that he is a monk. A troll really suits Kikuchiyo as he is the one with farmer origins and the one who really understand the villagers, who would all be metas if we think Plastic Jungles as the village (and because Kikuchiyo is big and dumb). I can see Katsushiro as the handler of the team's network. In the movie he was sort of doing this job, carrying the orders from Kambei.

About gangs stealing food supplies in the barrens, here is a quote I found in Runner Heavens p. 114:



Even contaminated by the soil pollution, they have an agricultural production of real food! Not the synthetic flavored soy stuff. And the gangs may start acting like the bandits in the film who also were taking women and children away.

But I came here to post that I just found some real life Plastic Jungles, with the metas living in and all...

That is the inside of one of the bio-domes of Project Eden. Now just imagine those domes after some years of decadence, with vegetation growing wild and squatters moving in...

low level PCs (300-350 bp, perhaps) or higher level gangers (actually build some yourself instead of relying on the ones listed in the BBB)

Arsenal has some great pieces of armor and weapons to use for samurai.

Because then it would be Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

I kinda like this idea. I might have a few maps or google images on my computer at home that would work. I'll post more later.

You might watch The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner and the AWESOME Steve McQueen. Since they use guns in the film it has a more akin feel to Shadowrun. As for the Samurai you could easily have them all specialise in different areas to keep things interesting.

1. Social Sam
2. Pistol Sam
3. Heavy Weapons
4. Medic
5. Close Combat
6. Crazy insane Sam
7. Coward Sam

Ok I Mixed specialties with personalities but you get my point.

as i've missed this classic (i know, don't hurt me. i can't find it anywhere) i can't comment on that aspect of it, but this is a campaign i'd play in. as well they don't have to be street sams. they could all be samurai because they live by the samurai's code. you get a physad sam, an actual street sam, a rigger, maybe a wolf shaman etc.

I think you could do an awesome rendition of the seven samurai in Shadowrun, the setting is really perfect for it.

But I'm not sure how go a run it would make. First of 7 is a rather unwieldy number of PC. And as toutri says 40 gangers (at least the one stated up in the BBB) would be chump change for 7 samurai's of modest power. Indeed it wouldn't be unreasonable for a much smaller group, perhaps as few as 1 sam to massacre a group of this size. Especially given the advantage of home ground and assistance from the inhabitants as in the movie.

These two problems have a common solution. Reduce the number of Samurai, and increase the strength of the opposition. The rangers stated up in Ghost Cartels would probably be more credible foes. Or you could bring one of my old favorite Gangs, the Red Hots, out of retirment. Last I recall those dueds some how had a fairly serious stash of heavy weaponry! Do this and you could probably make a decent run of it.

But to truely recreate the greatness of the story I think you just have to write it out. If anyone ever does so, I would love to take a read. It would even make a awesome movie, just so long as they keep Ted Theodore Logan out of it.

Alright, here a Google Maps location I snapped a few months back for a run set in the Rats Nest. It kinda has a Mad Max compound feel to it. Might work for the focus of a "defend the commune" type run. Haven't mapped the interior yet, but if I get to it in the next few days (not likely) I'll post them.

Large Area
Small Area
Building

This building is in New Orleans. If you're interested there are a lot of similar "junk yard" images from the surrounding area that work great for Barrens.

Also if you are looking for a "bio dome" looking building you could use the Mitchell Park Domes in Milwaukee WI. I realize the Plastic Jungle is supposed to cover kilometers. You could cut and past this basic structure together to make a complex and drop it into a desolate background like THIS and THIS (for example, not the best Photoshop job...). Otherwise I'm sure there are lots of domed buildings you could use. Maybe check out covered sports stadiums in urban areas.

As far as plot goes, if you want the gangers to be a daunting challenge for the runners give them an ulterior motive for attacking the commune. For example, there is a lot of canon fluff about the Ancients running smuggling ops through Tarislar in Puyallup. You could say that their handlers in the Tir have given them orders to clear this area because it is crucial to their smuggling ops and have provided them with serious fire power to get the job done.

Good Luck!!

A problem I can see with this whole idea is that characters are often glass cannons/eggs with hammers. All it takes is one lucky shot from a ganger (and an unlucky body+armor roll from the samurai) to take out a street samurai, and then the player will miss a lot of the action.

Those are great images, man. I'll use them as the bandits hideout in Rats Nest. And I'll use THIS as the bio-domes (multipling them with photoshop as you said).

I also looked at the place in Redmond where the Plastic Jungles should be to get the placement of all those lakes and the terrain elevation. The village should be in the middle of that area, by the small lake between Echo Lake and the 522 road, deep inside the wild grown jungles, where the Lone Star will never hear the shots and explosions...

Now I'm sure we will need some corp sponsor behind the gang and some dark motivation for what looks like a simple gang raid...

And about having seven PCs, thats not much of a problem because I'm expecting no more than 4-5 players. So 2 or 3 of the samurai will be NPCs, witch is good because I can use them as the first ones to die tragically (and if a PC samurai does get killed the player may take one of the NPCs and keep playing).

Later I'll post the adaptations I made of the seven main characters and I plan writing the adventure this weekend (first I must go watch The Magnificent Seven, the western adaptation of the Kurosawa's film).

A good point there. You could have one of the NPC sammies decked out as a medic, or if you're going to use magic/sam hybrids make sure somebody has a Heal Spell.

As far as sinister motivation: my original idea for the Rats Nest run involved a click of 162's (the ghoul gang) raiding a squatter commune for "food" (AKA somebody's buddy Leonard). Another sinister possibility is that the gang (not necessarily ghouls) is being paid to provide some megacorporate proxy a steady stream of small children for medical experiments. Kids from the Plastic Jungle would be ideal because they are 1.) healthy and 2.) non-entities.

Edit: oh and I like the domes you selected. Very futuristic. They would be perfect if the surrounding terrain wasn't so green and healthy...

Ya know, all this talk about seven samurai makes me wish for an RPG where men with swords fight giant robots and win all the time... And all it takes for a young boy to learn how is to stab a man in the chest, then his eyes will go all evil and stop being big and innocent, and he'll be able to vibrate his sword so fast that it fires lasers

Roof
Catwalks
Ground Floor
Basement Empty
Basement w/Food, Etc
Basement w/Bodies

Screw Plastic Jungle.

To get the feel of Seven Samurai go with a small CAS mining/farming town. This place used to be a booming company town, but the mine ran dry in the late 19th/early 20th century, leading the company to abandon it to rot and squalor, the few remaining residents serve the extended farming community around the area. The place is covered with small family farms who are barely about to hold out against the onslaught of megacorp industrial farming, extending in all directions for several miles. The town itself is a true podunk. The single gas station/general store is also the court house/sheriff's office. The county sheriff is also the county judge, having served in both offices for 8 terms due to the fact that he always runs unopposed (no one else wants to bother with either office); he also owns the gas station/store. His only deputy is his semi-competent cousin, who also pumps gas, and has both jobs solely through nepotism. There is also a barber shop, a mechanic, and a fairly large building that is sometimes used for town meetings and civic events.

The farmers who live outside the town are fairly numerous, and vulnerable. The goal of the bandits is to steal their crops, which are worth well over a million nuyen all totaled together (not due to expense, but simply because of their sheer total mass). This is not a smash & grab operation. It requires semi trucks - many of them -, forklifts, and time.
The idea is to violently cow the local farmers into submission with a public demonstration of excessive brutality and extreme firepower, which has already occurred, prompting the Sheriff to contact a guy he knows in the Dixie Mafia, who in turn contacted the PC's Fixer, who dumped the job on them. Up until this the worst that's ever occurred in the jurisdiction is a cattle stampeed facilitated by fences that are way too low. The Sheriff isn't really able to deal with gangers.

The grains have already been harvested and are in storage, waiting for distributors to come and pick them up. The gangers have 3 days to hit these storage facilities hard, each farm has its own and each will take the gangers an hour to clear out if they move fast. This is what the PCs will have to protect. It'll be hard because they're fairly spread out, and they don't know where the gangers will strike first. If the gangers are forced to retreat, they'll just set fire to the stored grains, ensuring that no one will have any. (And finely ground grain can be the fuel in a fuel-air explosive. One spark is all it takes to turn a grain silo into a crater if there is any dust in the air). For this reason alone, the PCs can't leave survivors.

As for the gang affiliations, nothing big enough to matter; huge international go-gangs wouldn't hit poor farmers; they'd go after shipping. The reason these guys don't is that they aren't good enough to take down a drone truck on the road.
They're essentially a bunch of upstart anti-authoritatin punks from the closest mid-sized town who've watched one too many episodes of Torgo (the officially licensed trideo series based on Lord Torgo's bestselling autobiography) and want to embarrass their overly-strict parents by going on a cross-country murder/rape/pillage spree. Nothing too big, the sheer amount of terrain they must cover the the big obstacle for the PCs. The good news is that, this being the rural CAS, every friendly NPC is armed and is a half-decent shot, though this won't help them without support from the PCs due to the gangers' overwhelmingly superior firepower.

Moving the grain stores into town might also be a good idea, but will require that the PCs supply sufficiently large trucks to do so and will take an hour per farm.

Amen to Hyz. 7 Samurai and Magnificent 7 are both about small *isolated* communities under attack from bandits, and the "hired help" are recruited from more urban mainstream areas. That's also a factor in the warrior-meets-peasant-girl subplot, if you're carrying that one over; for the girl, the warriors are the only guys around other than the villagers she's known all her life.

Of course, in Shadowrun, will the warriors all be guys (and straight)? The small isolated rural community may need the warriors but have issues with the warriors practicing "City Slicker" values and lifestyle. Perhaps a particularly intolerant villager (maybe a certain peasant girl's father) considers the runners a cure worse than the disease, and sells out to the bandits. Metatype issues are fair game; if the gang is all ork/troll, and any of the runners are ork/troll, the villagers might have a "but you're one of them" issue.

The village needs to not already be under the protection of anyone effective (or the local manager isn't bothering to fend off the bandits). The bandits could have a connection with someone who *wants* the villagers to accept a master, eg a corporate sponsor, and who resents the PCs being competition for the protection racket.

I love this rendition of the seven samurai done across the shadowrun backdrop. It fits very well, especially withe what someone said just above about Kambei having some social and leadership skills on top of his other talents.


I have to add that I can't believe anyone hasn't mentioned (or maybe I missed it, call me out if I am wrong) that the bandits were mounted nomads in the original movie, so therefore a go-gang would be the most expressive and best recreation of the bandits, giving a very big edge to the bandits again. Sure, they are just gangers, but with superior riding abilities and mobility of combat cycles, they would give the 7 samurai a tough time, just like in the movie.

We are also forgetting that the samurai launched a preemptive strike on where the bandits were holed up to thin their numbers prior to the battle. This is where Heihachi dies. There would be a good reason to launch a segment of the campaign to go and try to smoke them out, thin out their numbers before the final battle.

We also can't forget that the bandits had superior weaponry (3 rifles in the movie) and should be given that edge during the conflict. On another thread we discussed this already and came up with the idea that they might have gatling, HV, or guass weapons that would be major buzzkills to keep the samurai pinned down when they lay siege to the location.

Still a work in progress (has been a time tight week) but here are some general lines about what I've been planning for this game... Thanks for the many ideas you all!


The Seven Samurai

I thought that the best way to mimic the class conflict part of the movie was to make the character's background reflect their origins in some sort of 2070's warrior class. They all once served the feudal lords of the Sixth World, the corporations, in para-military or security units. By the beginning of this mini-campaign though, the characters had fallen from their former status, becoming wandering street samurai, masterless combat and security experts. The exception is Kikuchiyo, the one who was not from the samurai class in the movie, a SINless who managed to survive the barrens by himself, a thing he has in common with the squatter community the seven will protect against the raiding go-gang.

Kambei: A veteran from the Renraku Arcology shutdown, he once was a Red Samurai Captain. He barely escaped the arcology alive and the wounds he suffered in the process had to be dealt with a large amount of implants. He believes that Renraku behave in a most shameful manner and thus he was no more obligated by honor to serve the Red Samurai. He then became a wandering street samurai.

Shichiroji: Was a Red Samurai in the same unit as Kambei and when the unit was destroyed Shichiroji was thought dead. He managed to survive through his knowledge of the architecture and security design of the arcology. He had no wish to go back and work for Renraku again so he went to the shadows.

Gorobei: A former Ares Knight Errant longarms specialist. One day he missed a shot during a mission and because of that the bad guy didn't go down and the hostages were killed. The whole episode went to the news and Knight Errant suffered a minor loss of face in front of the public opinion. After that Gorobei was suspended from field work. He preferred to leave the company instead of doing bureaucratic jobs.

Heihachi: A former mid rank military, he was dismissed because he refused to snitch on a friend who he knew was involved in weapons smuggling. After that episode, he discovered himself as a dog shaman, witch explain both his amicable nature and his stubborn loyalty to friends (in the movie he is shot because he failed the willpower+charisma roll and could not leave anyone behind). The shadows were just the better way he could find to employ both his old combat skills and his new magical abilities.

Katsushiro: Rich corp kid with a romantic view of shadowrunners. He left his corporate home, the college graduation and the future job at the corp to run the shadows. Was studying to work as a matrix specialist and never had real combat training, so he just bought some skillsofts...

Kyuzo: A master in the traditional Japanese swordsmanship, he was once a respectful kenjutsu scholar and an Adept of the Warrior Path. He was a instructor of his art at Mitsuhama's magical research facilities. One day a disagreement with another master grown into a real sword duel and by the end of that he was the one standing. Kyuzo got arrested for murder and did his time in jail. After getting out, he realized that he could not go back to his old life and became a ronin shadowrunner.

Kikuchiyo: Grown as a street kid after his family was killed when the squat they lived was attacked. A strong ork, though a little clumsy, made his way as street muscle and is now a samurai wannabe with a big obvious second-hand cyber-arm. Really incompetent at Etiquette...


The Plastic Jungle Squatters

Shino: Young elf girl. She owns the only commlink in the community and is the only one who can operate it. She stumbled upon some gang communications and discovered that they are about to raid the community. When she told the others about this information her father got really pissed and locked her inside without her commlink.

Gisaku: The community elder and shaman (though his powers are limited to healing and agricultural related stuff). He comes up with the idea to hire samurai.

Yohei: He has an old wrecked pickup truck he can lend to the PCs (like the old horse in the movie).

ManzÅ?: Shino's father. He fears for his daughter's purity when surrounded by the dashing samurai.

Rikichi: Hotheaded and relatively young, he volunteers to go find "starving samurai for hire". He has a painful secret concerning his wife.

Rikichi's Wife: Will show up in the story if the PC's make the pre-emptive attack to the gang hideout. She was enslaved by them since the last attack to the squatters.

Mosuke: His house is one of the three outlying buildings that will have to be abandoned in order to save the rest of the community.


The bandits

A go-gang with combat bikes specialized in this kind of raid. They usually take away everything they can sell, including people. This time though they are after something else. A third party is after a stolen commlink with some personal information that was tracked down through some black market connections to its most recent owner, someone squatting at the Plastic Jungles of Redmond.

The commlink is now in the possession of Manzo and neither he nor his daughter knows about the device's content. Shino bought it as a second-hand commlink somewhere in the barrens. And the guy who sold her the commlink bought it from someone else who mugged it from some politician with connections that should not go public. So, if the encrypted data hidden in the commlink is exposed it would be a major political scandal. And that is how the go-gang got 3 heavy machine guns (or a minigun, a gauss rifle and a rocket laucher for variety of ways to achieve a TPK ) from their new sponsor.

Here are Kyuzo's stats for your critique...